About Paramedic Services
County of Simcoe Paramedic Services is committed to timely, clinically sophisticated emergency response and community strategies that preserve life, improve health, and promote safety.
Paramedic Services employs over 440 staff, which include full- and part-time Paramedics, Supervisors, and administrative support staff. All paramedics are certified as Primary Care Paramedics (PCP) or Advanced Care Paramedics (ACP) through the Sunnybrook Centre for Prehospital Medicine (SCPM) Base Hospital Program.
Paramedic Services is made up of two main program areas:
- Logistics and Community Programs
- Operations
Each area has a specific focus within the service and an integral part in the successful delivery of safe, professional, and skilled service to the County of Simcoe residents and visitors.
Our Mission
Paramedic Services is committed to timely, clinically sophisticated emergency response and community strategies that preserve life, improve health and promote safety.
Frequently Asked QuESTIONS
If you call by mistake, do not hang up, just stay on the line and tell the dispatcher that everything is OK. If you hang up, they may send a police officer to your location to investigate if there is a problem.
Providing critical information to paramedics will help them care for you as best and quickly as possible. Completing the information requested in the File of Life (link to file of life page) document will help save time in an emergency.
In any emergency it is important to stay calm, be organized and prepare for emergency services to arrive.
- Take care of immediate needs – follow instructions of dispatcher
- Ensure your house number is clearly displayed and illuminated
- After dark turn on your inside and outside lights
- Gather information (medications, medical history) – File of Life and health card
- Move pets into another room
- Clear way for stretcher and equipment, if possible
- Have someone in lobby/elevator
- Move all cars from the driveway, if possible
- Unlock and open the front door
If you have received an invoice for ambulance services, this invoice is not generated by County of Simcoe Paramedic Services, but by the hospital to which you were taken.
If you have questions regarding the billing information, please direct them to the hospital that sent you the invoice.
If you have any questions about why you have received an invoice, please see the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care website.
Normal land ambulance costs are billed at a rate of $240.00, of which all but $45.00 is covered by your provincial health insurance. Please note this fee is billed through the receiving hospital, and not paramedic services.
The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Emergency Health Service Branch’s Basic Life Support (BLS) Patient Care Standards, provides direction to transport patients to the closest hospital unit capable of providing the medical care apparently required by the patient.
There are 17 Paramedic Stations and eight satellite posts in the County of Simcoe, all strategically located throughout Simcoe County to provide quick response – Link to Station Location page
Our 911 call-taking centres are equipped with TTY terminals where they engage in a typed conversation with the caller, obtaining as much information as possible about the nature of the emergency. The call-taker then relays details to the appropriate agency on behalf of the caller. Our largest 911 call-taking centre reports that they receive an average of one TTY 911 call per year.
Unfortunately, unlike land line calls, 911 calls made from cellular phones do not provide precise address locations, rather, they provide a radius of likely location. This radius could be as great as a kilometre, or more. If police are unable to locate the caller using this GPS information, they will work with the cell phone carrier to try to locate the caller.
Texting to 911 for the DHHHI community is being piloted by Bell Canada now but is not currently available in Ontario. The date for full implementation has not yet been identified.
No. The County of Simcoe Paramedic Services does not offer ride-outs on any of our ambulances to members of the general public, due to patient confidentiality, and health and safety concerns. Ride-outs are limited to Paramedic students.