Austin Gionet cruises past Ottawa’s ByWard Market building when a woman flags him down.
Her name is Thumper. She sleeps in a staircase nearby and needs his help. Her hand is swollen around her thumb.
“I punched the security guard,” she tells Gionet, smiling.
Thumper insists it was a joke, but her hand is hurting so Gionet wraps it.
He suggests she see a doctor at a walk-in clinic the following day, and hopes that by gaining her trust she might one day take his advice.
“I don’t like going to the hospital,” Thumper tells him. “Once you’re a mental patient they treat you like a mental patient as soon as you walk in and I hate that.”
It’s interactions like this that Gionet says drew him to the job. The 25-year-old is one of 13 advanced care paramedics taking part in a pilot project in the ByWard Market.
The team recently invited CBC on an exclusive ride-along during three separate shifts. We rode next to Gionet as he helped some of the city’s most vulnerable and listened to the scanner for 911 calls where he thought he could be the most help.
Amid an overwhelming increase in demand for emergency services in the ByWard Market, paramedics are hoping going “off roster” will help them arrive quicker and treat patients faster. CBC Ottawa rode along with first responders to get a street-level look at the new approach.
Team makes its own calls
The team is “off roster,” meaning they decide which calls they attend rather than have a dispatcher send them.
The goal is to arrive quickly, assess the severity of the situation and promptly return any unneeded resources — ambulances, for example — back into service.
It’s all in response to an overwhelming increase in demand for paramedic services in the ByWard Market.
Logan Martin, acting commander of operations with the Ottawa Paramedic Service, said they used to send a full fleet of resources to respond to overdose calls in the area, but by the time crews arrived there was often no patient to be found.
“That’s a lot of resources to come down into the downtown market,” she said.
Instead, the paramedic team spends about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, driving around the ByWard Market in SUVs.
The project was launched in July with $200,000 in annual funding from the province for the next three years. That covers the salaries of two full-time advanced care paramedics.
In Ottawa, paramedics transport nearly 70 per cent of the patients they see, but the ByWard Market pilot transports only 38 per cent.
Data collected between July 2 and Sept. 30, shows the pilot responded to 548 emergency calls during that period.
In addition to responding to 911 calls, the team also works to build relationships with the community, including other agencies.
Co-ordination a ‘game changer’
Derrick St John, acting director of consumption and treatment services at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, said the paramedic pilot has been a game changer.
“It’s really great to be able to communicate with our peers and other people in the field to be able to provide patient care … to let EMS know our clinic is open, how busy the clinic is, if we can have folks seen,” he said.
The market medic program is just one of several new initiatives to tackle the opioid crisis plaguing Ottawa’s downtown core.
The Ottawa Police Service is also ramping up foot patrols in the area, hitting eight “hot spots” around the ByWard Market that have been problematic.
It’s called the Community Outreach Response and Engagement (CORE) strategy and is a direct response to concerns expressed by community and business owners.
Acting Sgt. Paul Stam, who leads the CORE strategy, said twice a week a team of eight officers splits up and pounds the pavement between 11 a.m and 7 p.m. CBC joined the officers during one of their shifts.
“This is policing 101, it’s foot patrol,” Stam said as he walked along Rideau Street. “Yes we want to reduce crime, but our real main objective, really and truly, is we want people to feel safer.”
That involves talking to people, Stam said.
“It can’t just be us walking around, it has to be us actually speaking to people and making sort of our presence known.”
Since the program was launched Aug. 6, officers have conducted just over 200 foot patrols and logged more than 500 “community engagements,” which Stam described as “check-ins with local businesses, interactions with street-involved individuals and conversations with local residents, tourists, and others.”
The total cost of the CORE strategy is about $4.8 million over the next three years. About 95 per cent of that is covered by the province with the majority of the funding devoted to staffing, officer training, overtime, vehicle costs and equipment.
The rest is spent on community support initiatives, evaluation and a new neighbourhood operations centre (NOC) in Rideau Centre.
Rewarding but challenging
CBC was also invited into the NOC to attend a weekly task force meeting of agency partners.
Besides police and paramedics, representatives from various agencies including the city’s bylaw department, OC Transpo, Ottawa Public Health and housing outreach sat around a table sharing updates and insights into what was happening on the streets.
The conversation shifted from drug supply to problem parking lots, and crowding in the pedestrian underpass at the corner of Rideau Street and Sussex Drive.
The hope is that with this type of collaboration, real change can happen.
“We definitely don’t have all the answers, we don’t have the perfect strategy, but we have a strategy and we’re going to learn and adapt as we go,” Stam said.
Gionet the paramedic said it’s hard to know if the work he does is making a real difference, but he does feel appreciated.
“It’s the most rewarding thing I could have ever asked for, despite what we go through on a daily basis,” he said.