Canada's Medical Decline

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24/7 mobile paramedic team created to address drug crisis in downtown Winnipeg

Paramedic teams will soon be available around the clock to respond to overdose calls in Winnipeg's downtown area as a pilot project to address the ongoing toxic drug crisis, the Manitoba government says.

But Winnipeg's mayor wonders where those paramedics will come from when the city is already in short supply.

"In the past week alone, several ambulances were out of service on multiple days because we lacked the staff to operate them," Mayor Scott Gillingham said in a statement following the province's announcement on Tuesday.

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Headed to the ER? Here's why you could now wait more than 48 hours to be admitted

On Monday morning, Maureen Armstrong's elderly mother suffered a fall and was taken by ambulance to a Windsor, Ont., emergency room. There, she waited more than 48 hours to be admitted.

By the time Armstrong spoke with CBC News on Wednesday afternoon, her 81-year-old mother was still waiting in the hallway for a hospital bed.

"It's very noisy and volatile and there's a lot of patients that might be unruly and things that security guards are taking care of," Armstrong said. "It's not really a healthy environment to be in long term."

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Top physicians warned Winnipeg hospitals nearing 'disintegration' in March letter

Top Winnipeg doctors warned in a confidential letter in March that urgent care centres might have to close and another patient death was inevitable unless immediate changes were made.

They say physicians are "repeatedly forced to choose" who gets care first, knowing the condition of other patients might decline while they wait.

"We do not want to stand at the bedside of another person who deteriorated due to preventable delays and gaps in care — knowing their outcome would have been different," the letter, which was addressed to health-care leadership, said.

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