Article content

Southwestern Ontario’s largest hospital and the London-area ambulance service are getting ready to let paramedics drop certain patients off in waiting room chairs when no hospital beds are available.

The pilot project by the Middlesex-London Paramedic Service and the London Health Sciences Centre is meant to stem the chronic problem of offload delays at the city’s emergency rooms, idle hours ambulances spend outside waiting to offload patients when there are no vacant hospital beds.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or LHSC, paramedics plan pilot to offload some patients to chairs, not beds Back to video

Under the new protocol, dubbed fit-to-sit, patients deemed well enough to wait in a chair can be dropped off in emergency room waiting areas, freeing up the ambulance crew to attend to other calls.

Ambulance crews are expected to spend no more than 30 minutes each time they drop off a patient at the emergency room. Any extra time is considered an offload delay. The delays typically happen when there are no beds available for incoming patients.