Report To: Program Planning Committee
From: Paul Myre, Chief of Paramedic Services
Date: September 23, 2021
Re: Paramedic Services Capital Planning - Issue Report
As some of our Paramedic Stations are approaching end-of-life and will soon require significant renovations or perhaps even replacement, staff have commenced an in-depth analysis process for capital planning purposes. For the first step, the Sault Ste Marie Innovation Centre has been engaged to perform a heat mapping of 911 calls throughout the entire Manitoulin-Sudbury district collating data from the 2017 to 2020 years. This heat mapping exercise of all urgent and emergent Paramedic Services calls over this three (3) year period will provide a focused analysis on current station locations. This process will inform decision making and recommend optimal station locations based on our current and projected response times.
Paramedic Services currently occupy 12 Paramedic Stations across our district. A Building Condition Analysis (BCA) conducted by HSC Business Solutions in September of 2020 provided the board with some future capital assumptions and explored a sound fiscal approach to ensure a prudent use of public dollars when addressing critical infrastructure components. Manitoulin-Sudbury Paramedic Services Stations were assumed not for their strategic placement but rather as legacy depots from previous service operators. As staff have reported on numerous occasions, several factors such as our aging population and increased call volumes are impacting our landscape and our ability to operate within it. A close assessment of our current asset location and exploration of system optimization opportunities are necessary for downstream planning purposes. Staff believe that this study would be an important initial step in understanding whether all of our stations are in optimal locations and would be a point of reference as stations attain their end-of-life expectancy.
Staff will present more information once data has been further analyzed.