Thanks to “Boom, Bust and Echo” we have all learned that demographics explain 2/3 of everything – what a great line from the noted guru David Foot!  Canadians are getting older one year at a time. Front-end baby boomers are on the cusp of becoming senior citizens.  Thus the coming “Aging Tsunami”.  The implications of the Aging Tsunami for Ontario’s municipal EMS services are sobering indeed.  EMS practitioners have known for some time that frequent-flier patients are composed primarily of the old and the super-old. The challenge has been quantifying this reality and communicating it to Councils, municipal CAOs and Ministry of Health senior officials come budget time. Requests for service, ambulance call volumes and staffing requirements have escalated beyond assessment growth in growth municipalities.  Even in low growth or no growth municipalities, call volumes have grown steadily year-over year.  The Aging Tsunami is the culprit.

The Performance Concepts recipe for EMS master planning has quantified the impacts of population growth and population aging – critical value-added for any EMS Chief trying to secure budget adds to address unavoidable service demand pressures. Requests for service can be modeled for each population age cohort and then applied to the Official Plan 10-year population forecast.  The master plan forecasting model churns out vehicle hour resource requirements and $ requirements system for a given level of system utilization (UHU) and response time.

Aging Tsunami