Ambulance N.B. asks Medavie to renegotiate contract over response times

Ambulance New Brunswick says it aims to reopen its contract with its private-sector service provider to address response times in rural areas that chronically fall short of provincial targets.

Officials told the legislature's public accounts committee that they are talking to Medavie Health Services New Brunswick Inc. about exemptions to the response-time targets and the formula that determines if ambulances are "on time."

"We've initiated those discussions with Medavie for the purpose of negotiating the contract," said Ian Watson, chair of the board at Extra Mural/Ambulance New Brunswick Inc., the provincial entity that contracts with Medavie for ambulance services and extra-mural care.

Last year officials told the same committee that there had been no moves to renegotiate the contract, which was the subject of a scathing report by the province's auditor general in 2020.

That report found that low on-time response rates in rural areas do not count against payments to Medavie because those calls are averaged into broader regional numbers that included a far greater number of on-time responses in urban areas.

That produces an overall number that looks good on the surface.

"The issue arises when there are bonus payments being paid out for meeting contractual obligations," Moncton Centre Liberal MLA Rob McKee told the Ambulance N.B. officials Wednesday.

"But when you do look community by community, some of those communities aren't meeting the targets or getting the service they should be getting." 

Under the contract, Medavie, a private company that operates the ambulances, must be on time for calls 90 per cent of the time.

"On time" is defined in the contract as within nine minutes in urban areas and 22 minutes in rural areas.

Figures for 2022 show Ambulance N.B. hit its on-time targets 93.5 per cent of the time in urban areas and 88.5 per cent of the time in rural areas.

But the figures on its website show individual communities with a range of on-time response rates, many of them very low: 

"There are communities, if you look at the data, that are not performing as well as other communities," Craig Dalton, CEO of Extra Mural/Ambulance N.B., told the committee.

The contract includes exemptions for circumstances beyond Medavie's control. In those cases, late responses don't count against the targets or its bonus payments.