SACRAMENTO COUNTY, Calif. — Long wait offload times from an ambulance into an emergency room bed across Sacramento County continue to be a growing concern for officials.
Sacramento County Emergency Medical Services say the county has long wait times for those who seek emergency care.
In September, Sacramento County says it took 56 minutes for patients to be transferred from an ambulance to a bed in emergency departments at hospitals across the county — the second worst in the state.
“We have an incredible challenge in Sacramento,” said Dr. Greg Kann, who is Sacramento County’s EMS Medical Director. “We are at a point where our 911 system is stretched to the point where there are dangers that exists to our folks who live in this community.”
Kann shared the news to Sacramento County Board of Supervisors in a meeting Wednesday. The data shows in the last 12 months, the average wait time for patients to get from the ambulance to an ER bed across hospitals was 69 minutes. It peaked at 84 minutes in December 2022, well above the national average of 25 minutes and California’s average 40 minutes.
“We have had a steady increase in the 911 call volume into our system for years of population growth, it is exploding in Sacramento County,” said Kann. “Then just a lot of folks who do not have access to primary care.”
Kann says the pandemic accelerated the problem. He adds, people who suffer a heart attack, stroke or are badly hurt, are seen a lot faster, but the other patients must wait.
“We need to attack this from multiple different angles,” said Kann.
Some of those angles are making telehealth widely available.
Now, one paramedic is at a hospital and can look after four patients, allowing the other ambulance to respond to emergency calls.
Then there's Sacramento Metro Fire’s Mobile Integrated Health, which is a pilot program pairing a nurse practitioner or medical assistant with one of the paramedics, taking care of low-level emergency calls like medication refills and dealing with minor injuries.
“The entire mission of our department is to get the patients the right care at the right place at the right time. And the emergency room is not always the best place for these patients,” said Capt. Parker Wilbourn, Metro Fire.
Metro Fire says the team treated and released 85%of the patients in the field. They hope, with more funding, they can have a larger impact.
State leaders are hoping to fix the issue. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 40, which requires every local EMS agency to create a plan that gets offload times to 30 minutes by July 2024.
