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Notes for remarks by Leah Casselman Good morning. My name is Leah Casselman. I’m the president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. I’m here today, at the Medical Air Transport Centre, known as MEDCOM, on behalf of the 100,000 public sector workers my union represents to talk about the urgent problems with our ambulance dispatch service. I’m joined today by:
I’ve very proud to be standing along side these folks. Chuck, Sandy, Patrick and their colleagues are on the front-lines of health care. They are the public’s first contact with emergency health services. When your loved one has had a heart attack, when you’ve been in a car accident, when your child has choked on something: these are the people you talk to. These are the people who get help to you when you so desperately need it. There are two urgent problems I want to raise with you today. I’m going to outline them and then Chuck, Sandy and Patrick will go into more detail. The first problem is the chronic short-staffing of our ambulance dispatch centres, including this one. The Ministry of Health runs one air ambulance dispatch centre – this one – and 11 land ambulance dispatch centres, called Central Ambulance Communications Centres, or CACCs. The Ministry told our union last winter that the CACCs only have a 30 per cent retention rate of new hires. Here at MEDCOM, only 22 of 30 full-time positions are filled. That number will drop to 21 in less than two weeks when one of Chuck’s colleagues leaves for a better job. This means that close to a third of the positions will be vacant. Chuck will tell you in a minute what a disaster this is for the people of Ontario who depend on the services he and his colleagues provide. I’ve just been on a tour of MEDCOM and it’s incredible what the folks inside this building do. They send airplanes and helicopters around the province, staffed with paramedics, to pick up critically ill patients, stabilize them and take them to a hospital. They send planes around Canada and even down into the U.S. to pick up organ donations. They work quickly, calmly and efficiently in a very stressful, pressure-filled environment. Being an ambulance dispatcher is not a job that everyone can do. It takes a qualified professional with the skills and judgment to make the necessary split second decisions to save lives. Depending on the job at MEDCOM, you have to either be a trained paramedic, a pilot, or you have to have accredited certification to dispatch aircraft. The problem at MEDCOM and the land ambulance dispatch centres around the province is that government wages are $10,000 - $20,000 below what other dispatch services pay. Toronto pays its land ambulance dispatchers up to $7 an hour more than the province. In January, the gap will widen to almost $9 an hour. Currently, Toronto pays its dispatchers $57,000 a year compared to the provincial top rate of $45,000 a year. In January, Toronto dispatchers will earn $61,000. The top wage rate for provincial dispatchers will be $47,000. And they only earn the top rate if they have been on the job for four or more years. Many do not stay that long to hit the top rate. And here’s the kicker: the money all comes from the same pot. While Toronto runs its own land ambulance dispatch service, it receives 100 per cent of its funding from the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health admitted it has “significant staff recruitment and retention challenges” in a document it released in May. It admitted the cause of the problem is that government wages aren’t keeping up. The document was a Request for Proposals – a tender – for a new dispatch centre in Niagara. The Ministry of Health said: “these challenges occur as a result of wage rates for police dispatch, fire dispatch and other allied agencies being significant greater than for CACC dispatchers.” We know, for example, that dispatchers for the fire department in Hamilton earn $62,000 a year. According to newspaper reports, they have won a raise that will see them earn close to $70,000 next year. The other urgent problem we’re raising today is the fact that dispatcher-assisted CPR is not a service offered by all of our dispatch centres across the province. Dispatchers at a few of our dispatch centres have been trained in it. Other centres have not received the training, and therefore cannot provide the service. Patrick Fry-Smith will explain to you that instructing people over the phone how to perform CPR saves lives. What we’re talking about today is improving and protecting public safety. What we’re talking about today is a system that has been limping along. It’s not completely broken, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the workers involved, but it’s not operating anywhere close to its optimum level. Our people are doing everything they can to make the system of ambulance dispatch work. They’re working themselves to the bone, trying to provide a critical service to the public. They’re doing it with inferior equipment, not enough training and too few staff. We’ve been talking about the chronic short-staffing at our dispatch centres for a number of years now. I was at Queen’s Park in November of last year and again this past May, trying to get the Tories to do something about it. I talked about a report that was done for the Ministry of Health in October 2001. This report recommended raising the wages of dispatchers “to reflect the current market” in order “to reduce the high staff turnover and attract qualified candidates.” Needless to say, the Tories never acted on this recommendation. We’ve got a new government now. They’ve got an opportunity to fix the mess the Tories left behind them. We estimate it would cost the Dalton McGuinty government $4 million a year to give our 272 ambulance dispatchers wage parity with Toronto’s dispatch service. Premier McGuinty has said he values public services. He said when he was sworn in that he believes in government and building a government people believe in. We look forward to working with him and his government to rebuild and repair our ambulance dispatch services. Thank you. Air and Land Ambulance Dispatch Campaign Index
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