New protocols to reduce ER visits a 'long time coming,' this P.E.I. paramedic says

Yeah, this has been quite a long time coming spend in the works for for quite some time as far as planning. But simply as you heard in the announcement, just recognizing that over 1/3 of patients who who phone 911 are are in fact not not requiring an emergency room. They require something they require some level of access to the healthcare system that that typically right now is served in the emergency room and just recognizing that that’s not what patients really want or or need. So this is allowing us to bring that those care. Care to those patients and serve their needs better. Take me through and if I call 911 and you determine I don’t need to go to the emergency room. What happens, what would happen to me as a patient. Yeah. So it does depend on where you are because these units right now are only are only deployed in Charlottetown and Summerside. And so if you are in one of those centers, if if it depends on really what your need is, when you call if if there’s any inkling that what you’re experiencing is a medical emergency, you will get an ambulance. You will get the closest available ambulance. And so but there are questions that 911 dispatcher would would run you through that would start to determine well maybe this it may be but maybe this is not a time sensitive emergency. So we will send you one of these, one of these CPR you paramedics over to check you out, get a good history, understand exactly what your needs are. If they determine that you do require a trip to the emergency department, certainly they will call one of their colleagues to come over in an ambulance and and that call would go as it normally would. But ultimately just trying to determine what your needs are and what resources may be in the community to help you meet those needs. And then we put you into a system where we’ll phone you back because simply giving people the information is one thing. We want to phone you back typically the next day or within 12 hours just to make sure you got what you needed. And if you didn’t, we can send somebody back over, we can send an ambulance. Ultimately, our fall back is, of course we will take you to the emergency room if you’re not able to access the care you need this way. It’s really just we know that there’s a large proportion of patients that we’re going to be able to help with this.