Staffing, salary audit ordered for N.L. private ambulances

Private and community ambulances in Newfoundland and Labrador are being audited to determine if they are properly staffed to quickly respond to emergencies.

The audit, announced Tuesday by Health Minister John Haggie, will cover the period from April 1, 2016 to Sept. 20, 2017 and take about nine weeks to complete.

Information to be collected includes ambulance staffing lists, time sheets and payroll records.

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The audit follows the cancellation of an ambulance contract in Happy Valley-Goose Bay after complaints from patients about unreasonably long response times.

Haggie said Tuesday afternoon the Department of Health has begun auditing ambulances run by the regional health authority, and has contracted firm Grant Thornton as an outside agency to audit private operators.

"With the concerns that came out of Happy Valley-Goose Bay recently, we had some further correspondence from people who raised some concerns, and I think we need to know what the situation is and people need to be able to have confidence in the ambulance service there," he said.

Liberals inherited 'fairly basic level of service'

Haggiesaid the Labrador experience has highlighted a series of problems not just with oversight but with the ambulance service itself.

"We inherited what was essentially a funding arrangement with a fairly basic level of service built into it," he said.

"We've had three reviews of the ambulance service in this province over the time I've been in office and prior, as well as another review of ambulance services based on the Northeast Avalon and Conception Bay, and they've highlighted that we could get a far better service for the money we invest, if we do things differently."

Doing things differently could mean central medical dispatching and service-level agreements with ambulance providers.

"The short answer is we want to do better; the more detailed answer is there's a lot of work to be done together."

Private ambulance operators have long argued that they don't get enough of a subsidy from the provincial government to keep emergency vehicles on the road 24/7, despite being contractually obligated to do so.

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The results of the audit will be presented to government and to the province's four regional health authorities and made public.