A new directive from the Quebec health ministry for ambulances serving the South Shore of Montreal is raising alarm bells as some residents are now being redirected to emergency rooms much further away.
Quebec s Health Minister Christian Dube said an action plan is coming as ambulances continue to be unable to respond to the vast majority of urgent 911 calls.
Data gathered by Hal Newman, the founder of primary healthcare blog The Last Ambulance, suggests that if you lived on the West Island in 2022, you waited an average of 13 minutes for a priority-one call. For calls to downtown, patients waited for 10 minutes.