‘Disgraceful’: N.S. man speaks out after mom waits 4 hours on floor for ambulance

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never arrived.In the fall, Global News also spoke with a Halifax woman with a broken ankle who waited three hours for an ambulance to come, and an elderly couple that waited 2.5 hours after an injury at Point Pleasant Park.And in January, a Nova Scotia paramedic spoke out about working conditions and a growing problem with offload delays — transferring the patient from ambulance to hospital — which are contributing to ambulance wait times.Hollier said he doesn’t blame the paramedics, nurses or doctors, but he’s frustrated with the government for the state of the health-care system.“I think it’s totally disgraceful in Canada that this is happening,” he said.“It’s obvious that the populations are getting older, the baby boomers are getting older, and there’s more and more incidents that are going to happen like this, and they’re not going to get proper care.”According to Nova Scotia’s Action for Health dashboard, the average wait time for an ambulance in the central health zone during the week of July 16 — the most recent data available — was 30 minutes, while the average patient offload time was 110 minutes.In an interview Friday, Charbel Daniel, executive director of provincial operations with Emergency Health Services, said he sympathizes with the family.“Our hearts go out to families when they’re in these situations and waiting for an EHS response,” he said.“We take these situations very seriously and we always do a massive service inquiry into them to look if there’s any quality improvement initiatives that we can do.”Daniel said there are a number of systemic impacts on ambulance wait times, including the time it takes to transfer patients to the hospital, as well as increased call volumes.But he noted that there are