Issues impacting Ontario’s healthcare system are extending beyond the hospital and into the streets as some paramedics raise concerns.

Shrinking staff and burnout are among the top concerns the paramedics are flagging.

Some paramedics say COVID-19 illnesses are keeping people off the job, and some are leaving the profession due to burnout.

In the Region of Waterloo, they say it's not uncommon to be down one or two ambulances a day because they don't have enough staff.

“When it all culminates we do have staffing issues where we might be down an ambulance or two a shift just because we can’t find replacement staff,” said Stephen Van Valkenburg, chief of the Region of Waterloo paramedic services.

“Typically for us, people are getting COVID, and our staff are tired, it’s been 2.5 years of working at breakneck speed,” he said

Van Valkenburg says people are leaving the service, and replacing them has been difficult.

“We actually did our first fall recruitment last fall, we are doing a second one this year, when we put the call out we are not attracting the same staff that we used, and everyone is vying for that same staff,” said Van Valkenburg.

The other issue is offload delays.

“It’s a public safety risk, for those people laying on the floor that called 911 if we can’t get our ambulance out of the offload bay. Those people are suffering,” said Van Valkenburg.

Paramedic crews have found themselves stuck at the hospital because they cannot hand off patients to an overcrowded and understaffed hospital.

They say sometimes an offload delay can take up to ten hours.

“It can be anywhere from immediate for the really high priority patients where they take over for them, we can see delays of six, eight, ten hours before they go from our stretcher to the hospital bed,” he said.

These offload delays mean the valuable time paramedics can spend on the road is reduced as they wait to hand the patient over to the hospital.

“It’s a public safety risk, for those people laying on the floor that called 911 if we can’t get our ambulance out of the offload bay those people are suffering,” he said.

Van Valkenburg says the provincial government needs to step in and make necessary changes.

“It's really time for the government to take different actions to solve this problem, give incentives to the hospitals to make sure offloads are done in 30 minutes, give priority to triaging patients that are coming in from paramedic services to free up our paramedics to get them back on the road,” he said.

A recent report from the Guelph Wellington Paramedic Services shows local paramedics cared for patients in offload delay for more than 4,900 hours in 2021.

This includes an increase in delays lasting longer than 90 minutes, which was up by over 300 per cent from 2020, according to the report.

“Other factors that affected response times in 2021 included an increase in call volumes by 14 per cent over 2020. A similar pattern of increasing call volumes is being experienced by most paramedic services in Ontario and internationally. In addition, paramedics continue to be required to take extra time on scenes and after calls because of the COVID pandemic – donning additional Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and utilizing enhanced cleaning practices,” the report reads in part.