Ambulance shortage in Montreal?

If you call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency you expect an ambulance to show up quickly, right? Well, not necessarily, Hal Newman explains in this revealing interview with CJAD’s Aaron Rand.

Hal, you may recall, was the first professional director of Cote Saint-Luc Emergency Medical Services when we launched our first responder service in 1991. A paramedic with extensive training and experience both in the U.S. and Canada, Hal worked for many years professionally and in a volunteer capacity. These days he also runs The Last Ambulance, an independent journalistic website focusing on pre-hospital emergency medical care.

Listen in on this short interview. You’ll be surprised by what he has to say.

Paramedic shortage plaguing Montreal

Ambulance crew attending to victim in Cote Saint-Luc

This week, former Cote Saint-Luc EMS Director Hal Newman analysed the current Paramedic shortage at Montreal and Laval’s Urgences Sante ambulance system with Elias Makos on CJAD 800.

Newman created a Facebook page The Last Ambulance as a collaborative project from Big Medicine & The Rover tracking paramedic / ambulance shortages. Their belief is that problems with the prehospital care system will only be addressed when enough people are aware of just how high the ongoing risk has become.

I could not agree more.

Newman spent many years as a volunteer with Cote Saint-Luc’s Emergency Measures Organization in the 1970s and 1980s. When I was elected to City Council in 1990 I spearheaded the transformation of the civil defence oriented EMO into a first class first-responder EMS service. Hal Newman was hired as the inaugural professional director and with passion and determination operationalized the fledgling first responder service, a model life saving organization.

With half-a-century of professional involvement in Quebec’s prehospital emergency healthcare system Newman is well qualified to speak out on the strengths and weaknesses of our regional ambulance services.

Listen to Hal Newman on CJAD here.

Hal Newman received the Emergency Medical Services Exemplary Service Medal in 2014