THUNDER BAY -- Ornge Air Ambulance has taken steps to solve its staffing issues at its local base.
Officials with Ontario’s air ambulance announced Thursday they would be adding a third paramedic team. The local base has one helicopter and two airplanes to service the Thunder Bay region.
But the base had only two paramedic crews, leaving one of the three aircrafts grounded when it might be required.
Andrew McCallum, President and CEO of Ornge, said the new team will help to ensure that doesn’t happen anymore.
“The pilots were already there but the challenge was we had the aircraft and not the paramedics so we didn’t have the complete package,” McCallum said.
“We’re working within our existing budget to find efficiencies. You enter into an organization and you say that everything that could have been done has been done but there’s opportunities here to be more efficient and give more value to the dollar.”
McCallum reassured that finding efficiencies didn’t mean cuts to services.
Although the issue of staffing was made public last summer, McCallum said there was a number of logistics that they had to work through in order to fit the new paramedics into their budget.
He said they wished it could have gone faster but thought they went as quickly as possible.
Ornge plans to search for the new paramedics within Northwestern Ontario but if no able candidates are found the organization will look elsewhere. McCallum was optimistic that they could find the new paramedics in the region.
