The Warden of Essex County says adding one or two ambulance runs daily to Leamington District Memorial Hospital is improving ambulance response times.
Essex-Windsor EMS says at a time when the number of calls is increasing; it's not meeting the provincial standard of six-minute response times for the most urgent calls in some parts of Essex County. So far this year, it's only met the target 55% of the time. Last year, EMS met the standard 59% of the time, and 60.5% of the time in 2013.
Part of the problem is continued wait times at Windsor Regional Hospital's emergency departments. Paramedics are sometimes left waiting to unload patients and can't respond to other calls.
Tom Bain hopes more calls get diverted to Leamington.
"The move to take some of the calls into Leamington's hospital is actually working very well," he says. "What they're going to do now is monitoring it, and looking at increasing the number of runs to the Leamington Hospital, as opposed to sitting at the Windsor hospitals."
Council will review a second report next month.