Napanee Council learns of new 'medical priority dispatch system' to be implemented shortly

The service those in Greater Napanee receive in an emergency if 911 is called should significantly improve in the first week of February 2025.

At its regular meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2025, the Council of the Town of Greater Napanee had the opportunity to learn about the coming changes. Lennox and Addington County Paramedic Chief Craig Jones made a presentation to Council about the new Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS), which will be implemented by paramedic services across southeastern Ontario and the Kingston Central Ambulance Communications Centre (KCACC) on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025.

Fire services are a municipal responsibility, while the County runs paramedicine. Hence, Jones’s presentation focused on changes to the “tiered response agreement,” where fire first responders agree to support paramedics responding to medical emergencies.

Jones called it a timely change, saying, “The province has elected to switch to a solution called the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS), and what it allows our dispatchers to do at our medical call centres is to ask a lot more questions to drill down and better understand how sick, or less sick, an individual is, and it develops an urgency of response based on those questions.”

He pointed out that, previously, ambulances would respond with “lights and sirens to everything.” He said that approach "uses more fuel; it's stressful for the patients; and a lot of times it's not warranted. So [this new system] allows us to respond more appropriately.”

Based on the data from other dispatch centres and other areas of the province that have implemented the MPDS, the chief said there has been “about a 70 per cent reduction in those lights and sirens calls.”

This, he explained, was a leap forward for paramedicine. Previously, ambulance crews had to respond to calls in the order they were received, and on busy days, that meant sometimes individuals with lesser emergencies ended up prioritized over people in life-threatening situations.

“I can't be redirected to another call, so I could be driving past you having a heart attack, and because of the way the legislation is written and the way the dispatch solution that we currently use works, I wouldn't be able to stop,” Jones said.

“So that's frustrating as a paramedic when you know you're going to a call for 'back pain' and you hear 'cardiac arrest' right around the corner and [aren't] able to go to that.”

Jones called this new system “the biggest change to paramedic services in my 32 years of service” and praised it, saying, “It is going to be better for the mental health of my paramedics.”

Calls to 911 services will now be colour coded either purple or red, based on a series of questions the dispatcher asks the patient or the caller. Purple is for emergent and immediate life-threatening conditions, while red is for emergent and potentially life-threatening conditions and is therefore lower priority.

“[MPDS] is a medically evidence-based solution used in 32,000 dispatch centres worldwide, and I believe it's 46 countries… This is not a new system. It has been proven," Jones shared, noting that the system it is already in place in the Toronto, Ottawa, Peel, Halton, York, and Niagara regions, as well as many more jurisdictions in Ontario, and will soon be standard across the province.

"MPDS has got a clinical physician out of Toronto attached to this portfolio with the Province of Ontario,” he continued, explaining that the “built-in Q&A analysis process” is “automatically generated."

"That physician looks at the call to better understand how the questioning could have determined the patient's illness or severity more appropriately.”

“We as medical practitioners have no concerns," Jones said of implementing the new system. The paramedic chief said the L&A paramedics are very happy to free up the Greater Napanee fire chief and his staff from responding to ambulance calls, and free those staff from doing paramedic support. But, he added, “The chief and his people will be there if we need them. And I do not in any way, shape, or form feel that our citizens will be receiving any less level of care.”

When Council was given the opportunity to ask questions, Councillor Dave Pinnell wondered, “If there's going to be more questions being asked [by 911 operators], is the ambulance already rolling while these questions are being asked? I'm just worried about the time.”

Jones said there would be no delay in response time. He explained that the new questions “very quickly determine, [are they] breathing? Are they breathing normally? Do they have a pulse? Are they speaking? Those things let the dispatcher know this is not a purple call; if the person's talking and speaking, it's not a purple call.” Thus, it is lower priority, but the ambulance is still already on the way, he explained.

Deputy Mayor Brian Calver thanked the chief, saying, “This will benefit the community hugely. It's gonna not tie up as many resources. Unfortunately, I live out of town, and we're at that magic number of 15-minute [response time]. So every time an ambulance is called, the big red [fire] truck is right behind it; 90 per cent of the time, it's not called for. So I appreciate everything you guys have done while working on this. Thank you very much.”

Jones said his team is very excited about the change.

"We're not going to say it's going to be perfect out of the gates, but we're committed to work with the fire departments and the municipalities," he relayed. "And if we have oddball cases, we'll review them to understand better what happened, and what we could have done better. Or in that context, we can also celebrate our successes.”

Mayor Terry Richardson also thanked Jones, reiterating, “This system is a tried, tested, and proven system... We at the County of Lennox and Addington or our municipality are not introducing anything new. This has been used and dealt with in many municipalities, not only in this province or this country but around the world... It's a system that has been proven to work."

The mayor added that this development has been in the works at the County level for a long time, and, “We're happy to see it coming, and we're hopeful that it's going to be a good system.”

According to an earlier media release from both L&A County and Frontenac County, paramedics from Lennox and Addington Paramedic Services, Leeds Grenville Paramedic Service, Lanark County Paramedic Service, Hastings-Quinte Paramedic Services, and Frontenac Paramedics rely on KCACC communications officers to receive 911 medical calls and coordinate paramedic dispatch across southeastern Ontario.