SUSAN LEBLANC: My question is for the Minister of Health and Wellness. Every day in this province, ambulances and patients are tied up, waiting dangerously long times, to be off-loaded at the hospital. On a recent Tuesday evening, I was told that 17 paramedics were at the QEII waiting to off-load patients. In her report on this issue, the Auditor General said, “We recommend the Department of Health and Wellness publicly report weekly ground ambulance response times by community and offload times by hospital.” I can table that. Presumably the minister has this information. Will she commit to reporting it weekly?
HON. MICHELLE THOMPSON: Certainly we are very committed to be a transparent government that reports on a variety of metrics, and I would point the member opposite to Action for Health. On a regular basis, not always weekly, but on a monthly or quarterly basis -sometimes annually, depending on the metric -we do post information there so that Nova Scotians can see how the system is performing. Not alwaysare those the best outcomes that we’d like, and those are the places where we focus the most, so I would say that we are very transparent. We are very committed to being transparent with Nova Scotians. We continue to work with the provider as well as the Nova Scotia Health Authority around off-load times as well as other metrics. I would point the member to the Action for Health website.
SUSAN LEBLANC: The current standard says that an ambulance that arrives at an emergency room should be able off-load the patient in 30 minutes or less. The government’s most recent public data show that for the week of October 1st, in the Western Zone, the average off-load time was 88 minutes. In the Northern Zone, it was 92 minutes. In the Central Zone, it was 139 minutes, and in the Eastern Zone, it was a 150-minute average -an average wait for thepatient to be off-loaded into the emergency department and the paramedic to get back on the road which is five times longer than the standard. But when it comes to what is happening at each individual hospital, people are left in the dark. So why is the government hiding this data?
MICHELLE THOMPSON: Certainly, there is no attempt to hide any information at all whatsoever. We’re not trying to hide it at all. In fact, we’re the first government that has an Action for Health website that actually shows the data for what’s happening in the health care system. What happened is we’re working very hard across this province. We have a number of places where the off-load times are meeting standards. We look at places like the Aberdeen Hospital, we look at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital, and we look at all ofthese hospitals and we take what’s happening there, and we scale it as best we can. There is nobody taking their foot off the gas in terms of response time. We are under-bedded in this province, in long-term care and in the hospitals, and have been for decades. We also need to increase staffing. So there’s a ton of work that’s happening around off-load times.