A 10-year-old child died in Bas-Saint-Laurent on Monday after waiting for an ambulance for very long minutes.
On January 2, Esprit-Saint’s parents called 911 when their child went into cardiac arrest.
Since the only ambulance in the area was already occupied, another vehicle had to be fetched from the municipality of Cabano, 57 kilometers away.
When paramedics arrived at the scene, the child was unconscious.
They performed resuscitation maneuvers before driving to Rimouski Hospital, 55 kilometers away. Unfortunately the child passed away.
While it is not yet clear whether his death could have been avoided, many denounce that the sector is not adequately covered.
“57 kilometers from Cabano to Esprit-Saint, that’s a whole 40 minutes more. If the ambulance had been on dynamic duty, it could have been there in 10 or 15 minutes at most,” Vice President of the Quebec Prehospital Workers Association, Jérémie Landry, tells TVA Nouvelles.
“It’s been a good half hour since the little one wasn’t treated. Caring that could have made a difference in survival. We can’t say today whether we could have saved him or not, but in urgent cases every minute counts. In that case we would have taken every minute to give it to the child.
The Esprit-Saint sector is doubly exposed.
There are always shift schedules, ie paramedics are at home waiting for a call.
First of all, there is no dynamic deployment. This means that if the only ambulance is manned, another ambulance will not be sent from a more distant sector to cover just in case.
“I experienced it a year and a half ago with my wife who had a heart attack here. It took half an hour for the ambulance to arrive,” says the mayor of the municipality, Langis Proulx.
“I think an ambulance would be a priority in our sector. It would definitely save lives.”
The CISSS du Bas-Saint-Laurent pre-hospital service says the sector does not have the sufficient volume of calls (325 in 2021) to implement the dynamic deployment at the moment.