Ambulance offload delays continue to be an issue locally, and across Ontario, however the province doesn't track the problem.
According to the Canadian Press, several Ontario municipalities, including Essex County, continue to face ambulance pressures with stretches of times where no ambulances are available to respond to calls, also known as code blacks.
While the Ontario government does have data on the hours paramedics spend waiting in emergency rooms to transfer patients to hospital care, they won't disclose that information either.
A spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones tells the Canadian Press that the province doesn't track that information because municipalities are responsible for ambulance deployment strategies.
Speaking on AM800's The Shift, Essex-Windsor EMS Chief, Bruce Krauter, says that he has been keeping track of the region's data, and found that from January to May, code blacks and code reds tend to happen between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Krauter says they are in constant communication with Windsor Regional Hospital and Erie Shores HealthCare.
"We're not only connected on a weekly or monthly basis, we're connected daily where we're tracking this, we're talking about it, we're planning it, and we're hitting the item head on if I can say it that way. And we're working very well together. We're actually providing some information to the province more than what the province provides to us."
He says there is lack of availability of urgent care clinics and primary care during their busiest hours.
"This isn't a means of throwing a dart or a target at anybody, it's just an analysis that we see that people have no where to go and they're going to use the emergency rooms. And it's supported by our data that we look at with the code reds and blacks."
He adds that they're hoping to receive a new dispatch system within the next few years that would filter and prioritize calls that come in.
"We're finding that we over prioritize and transport people in a lower acuity state. With the new algorithm it looks at it in a more granular level to really determine if you need an ambulance right away, or can it wait, or I'll offer different alternate levels of care to you instead of, bang, sending an ambulance out all the time."
Krauter says there was a 22 per cent increase in ambulance offload hours between Erie Shores HealthCare, and the Ouellette and Met campuses at Windsor Regional Hospital between 2021 and 2022.
The County of Essex declared an emergency in the fall due to long offload delays and code reds and blacks. Krauter says there has been some improvement since then but the local emergency remains in place until there are no more code reds or blacks.
-with files from AM800's The Shift and The Canadian Press