Hal Newman News Today

Quebecs Health Minister Christian Dube said an action plan is coming as ambulances continue to be unable to respond to the vast majority of urgent 911 calls.

A new directive from the Quebec health ministry for ambulances serving the South Shore of Montreal is raising alarm bells as some residents are now being redirected to emergency rooms much further away.

Paramedics in the Montreal area held a protest Monday to denounce new ministerial protocols that come into effect Tuesday.

Ambulance response times in Montreal are not what they should be. On the West Island they’re worse, according to Hal Newman.

Data gathered by Hal Newman, the founder of primary healthcare blog The Last Ambulance, suggests that if you lived on the West Island in 2022, you waited an average of 13 minutes for a priority-one call. For calls to downtown, patients waited for 10 minutes.

New stats show an alarming spike in emergency room mortality, with lengths of stay that are by far the highest of any province.

Hal Newman, founder of the Last Ambulance, says he suffered from PTSD after the ice storm and his career as a paramedic.

On this day 25 years ago, rain, freezing rain and ice pellets began to fall on southern Quebec, beginning five days of storm during which more than 100 millimetres of precipitation fell on the province, leaving millions without power.

Doctors are sounding the alarm on overcrowding of children’s hospitals in Quebec as some patients have to be transferred to ICUs hundreds of kilometres away. Children are coming in with respiratory viruses, like the flu, COVID-19 and RSV.

For all the emphasis on health-care solutions this election campaign in Quebec, little has been said about the pre-hospital network, where critical staffing shortages threaten the quality of care. That's not surprising to many in the industry who work in Montreal.