The Ottawa Paramedic Service missed its response time target for the highest-priority emergency calls in 2025, although it met or exceeded targets for other categories and showed steady improvement over the past four years.
CTAS 1 Response Falls Short
Paramedics have a target time of eight minutes to respond to the highest-priority calls on the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS), which are classified as CTAS 1 for life-threatening emergencies. The Ottawa Paramedic Service achieved that response time in 70.4 per cent of CTAS 1 calls in 2025, falling short of the council-approved 75 per cent target.
Response times for lower-priority calls range from 10 minutes for urgent (CTAS 2) calls to 25 minutes for the lowest-priority (CTAS 5) calls. Paramedics met or exceeded the target of responding to 75 per cent of calls within each of those categories.
Cardiac Arrest Response Improves
Paramedics met the response time for sudden cardiac arrests, which have the shortest six-minute target, in 75 per cent of calls in 2025. This marks a significant improvement from 2022, when paramedics only responded to about half (48.4 per cent) of sudden cardiac arrests within the six-minute window.
Each of these response time metrics has seen steady improvement over the past four years, according to a presentation to the emergency preparedness and protective services committee on June 15.
Strategies and Investments
The paramedic service said it is continuing to implement strategies to respond to the most critically ill patients. Council approved a new investment strategy in 2022, and the paramedic service “followed through” on the recommendations, said Chief Pierre Poirier. This included hiring 141 personnel over the past four years and focusing on improving response times as call volume “increased significantly.”
“Going back four years, our service was not great,” Poirier acknowledged to committee members.
Reduction in Level Zero Events
The number of “level zero” events — periods when no paramedic crews are available citywide — has been drastically reduced. Paramedics were at level zero for 73,060 minutes in 2022, and that number was slashed to 866 minutes last year.
“As we do continue to improve, our position is that there should never be a time when no paramedics are available to respond to calls in the community, and we continue to develop strategies to reduce level zero events,” said Deputy Chief Greg Furlong.
Offload Delays Decrease
The service has also seen significant improvements in reducing “offload delay” — the time paramedics spend in the hospital waiting to transfer a patient to emergency department staff. Paramedics set a target of 30 minutes of offload delay in 90 per cent of patient transfers.
Delays at The Ottawa Hospital General campus were reduced from 163 minutes in 2022 to 58 minutes last year. At the Civic campus, delays fell from 136 to 47 minutes. Offload delays were reduced from 168 to 53 minutes over the same period at the Queensway Carleton Hospital, from 39 to 36 minutes at CHEO, and from 224 minutes at the Montfort hospital in 2022 to 53 minutes last year.
