First responders to answer call in West Island

BY ANDY BLATCHFORD

andy.blatchford@transcontinental.ca

The City of Montreal will unfurl a blanket of emergency first-response services across the region and the West Island should be fully covered by the end of the year.

Over the next three years, firefighters from all 66 of the island’s stations will be trained to provide basic life support and patient stabilization.

“We’re going to save a lot of lives,” said Richard Liebmann, a division chief with the Montreal service. “We’ll be there to add to the ambulance service and to fill those critical first few minutes and really make the difference between life and death.”

The improvement is expected to save 60 to 90 lives across the island annually, according to a release posted on Montreal’s website last week.

Currently, eight Montreal departments have first-responder services, four of which are in the West Island — Pointe Claire, Beaconsfield, Kirkland and Dollard des Ormeaux.

“What we’re doing is basically optimizing the use of the resources that are already there,” Liebmann said. “Because we already have stations around the island, (the service) will enable us to have a rapid response time.”

Firefighters will undergo 62 hours of training to learn skills such as semi-automatic defibrillator operation and oxygen therapy in critical emergency situations, he said.

Departments serving West Island municipalities will be among the first to take part in the upgrade. The training will start in the spring and the new service will be implemented by the summer, according to the Montreal Fire Service.

“It’s good news,” Senneville Mayor George McLeish said. “But it doesn’t take away (the fact) that there is a problem with the ambulance service.

“The ambulance response time here is terrible.”

From his estimate, it takes Urgences Santé technicians more than 30 minutes to answer calls in the island’s western-most municipality.

In Baie d’Urfé, the average wait time is around 14 minutes, which is a “long time,” Mayor Maria Tutino said.

“It’s wonderful for our population that the (first responder) service is going to be right on our doorsteps,” she said. “Our citizens will be a lot more secure.”

Urgences Santé spokesperson André Champagne said the 2006 island-wide average response time was eight minutes and 45 seconds. The organization no longer keeps track of times for cities and boroughs, he added.

“We used to do it, but now we deal with so many statistics the technology department was overwhelmed with all of the information that we were asking for,” he told The Chronicle.

There are fewer emergency calls from low-density areas such as the West Island, making it a challenge for Urgences Santé to cover, Champagne said.

“Our units will always be directed where the action is and the action is obviously directed towards downtown,” he said.

For McLeish, who has lobbied the province to lower ambulance response times in his town, Urgences Santé’s average adds up. “(Response is) four minutes downtown and 40 minutes out here,” he said.