It’s a little quieter these days at 667 Bayfield St. N.
The County of Simcoe Paramedic Services has redeployed its emergency staff, which still comes to the ambulance station there at the city limits.
“What we’ve done is moved the crews that would normally book on at that location. They start their day now at the Barrie-Simcoe Emergency Services Campus down on Fairview Road (in Barrie),” said Deputy Chief Shane Smith, who oversees logistics and community programs with County of Simcoe Paramedic Services.
“The station that’s on Bayfield (Street) right now, like the new one we opened in downtown Barrie (at Ross and Mary streets, in the spring), they’re used as posts,” he added. “Throughout the day, those vehicles (ambulances) are actually sent to the post downtown or the Bayfield station and they provide coverage out of those locations.”
Smith said county paramedics will use the Bayfield North station until about 2025, according to the plan, until a new post in Midhurst, just off Snow Valley Road, is built.
“So once that new post is complete, then date-wise that will correspond with the end of the lease at the Bayfield station,” he said.
The Bayfield North station looks less busy for a number of reasons, Smith said. When the crews were booking on there, their personal vehicles would be left at that location. Sometimes ambulances would park outside, too.
“It’s 24-hour coverage, so we always endeavour to get a vehicle up there (Bayfield North) and to provide coverage, just depending on what the call volume is and where the other vehicles are,” he said. “So we could have a number of vehicles at the hospital (Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre) and they’re coming clear and also providing coverage.
“It really all depends on what the availability is and how quickly we can get those cars (ambulances) back up to 667 that we can make sure that we have coverage up in that area," Smith added.
The Bayfield North station’s coverage area is typically southern Springwater Township, the Midhurst area and the north end of Barrie.
“There’s not really a defining line for it,” Smith said.
And it’s a new way of providing ambulance service.
“That’s all part of the hub-and-spoke model that we brought forward when we got the original approval of the campus,” he said. “So the idea behind it was that all the systems that the crews would need to get ready at the beginning of the day would be available at one spot (the Fairview Road campus) and that’s where they would all book on, at the hub and then they would go out to one of the posts.
“There’d be a one- or two-bay post or building that you would be able to put up in Barrie and part of that is because it’s a little more flexible,” Smith added. “As Barrie grows, we can add these posts as needed. It’s a smaller footprint and less cost to build a post versus a full book-on station.”
A post generally has a bathroom, crew space and a garage, he said, where a full book-on station would have that plus a report room where paperwork would get done, medical supplies, a locker room and changing facilities. Now most of that is at the campus.
It’s on a much smaller piece of land, too, so an ambulance post is more cost-effective.
“As Barrie grows, it’s a lot easier for us to build these one-bays… as opposed to the larger stations,” Smith said.
