“Eastern Ontario Paramedics chiefs got together and put forward a proposal, supported by the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus, to develop a COVID Paramedic Rapid Response Team. This really would be a couple of paramedics within each service to respond as part of a regional team to areas that require immediate response, whether from a surge or local outbreak. Really kind of pool some resources.”
” In a day and a half we swabbed 2,750 residents with 10 different paramedic services all working together, along with many other health care partners.”
He added, “The goal of that was really to try and develop little kits. We’re in the process right now of ordering and I’ve ordered kits for our area that can be used locally as well as if we needed to be deployed into other areas…We got kits put together to deploy locally, if need, to increase testing capabilities here or called on to support other municipalities.”
Socha has also taken steps to try to obtain stable funding for the community paramedics work.
“We’ve put in a proposal as well to Ontario Health to maintain stable funding for community parmedics and to expand that to areas that don’t have currently a paramedic program.”
Mayor of Tweed Joanne Albert questioned whether there could be more service in her municipality and Central Hastings.
“Central Hastings is being missed out. You’ve done a wonderful job, the unsung heroes, but when you look at areas such as Belleville, Quinte West, (you realize) Bancroft, Central Hastings have totally missed out. We do have five or six schools in the area. I’m getting asked questions all the time about how come we can’t have a test site in our area. I’m just saying a permanent, one stop, test site that the people of our Central Hastings can go to.”
Socha replied, “We’ve certainly been supporting them and ran some independent ones, this past summer, through Central Hastings with the pop-ups for sure. Absolutely, that’s available. What we’re learning with these new kits is that we’ll be able to host those again. Whether it’s in conjunction with Quinte Health Care or if we look at doing a Surge Response that we’d be able to offer that independently, so that we’re able to increase those testing opportunities.”
He added, “I’m not sure of the logistics of how the hospitals went through Ontario Health but I can bring forward that concern. I think that’s really what the idea around developing these Surge Response Teams is, to highlight areas that have those gaps and to have a team ready to respond into those areas.”
