Almost half of Winnipeg's 911 calls 'non-urgent,' says report recommending significant changes

The City of Winnipeg may make dramatic changes to how emergency response is co-ordinated — if it follows some of the recommendations detailed in a report from the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

In 2019, the city was chosen to take part in the initiative, sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Ultimately, a team from the city and the leadership initiative identified the challenge: "Winnipeg's existing 911 emergency response agencies are being dispatched to non-urgent calls that they are not best suited to manage."

According to statistics provided by the Winnipeg Police Service, almost half of the calls to the emergency 911 line "did not represent an imminent threat to life, limb, property, or personal security."

Based on the recommendations of the report, the city is trying to improve co-ordination of the 911 communication centre with other agencies, including HealthLinks, Winnipeg's 311 information line and the recently created 211 line (set up by the United Way to help residents connect to health and social services).

The Winnipeg Police Service has begun an assessment to create a police and crisis team (PACT). It would bring crisis workers and police officers together to provide a different level of response to calls for assistance.

The report highlights a number of significant challenges to reforming the response system:

• The current 911 response system reflects an incredibly low risk threshold.The impact of dispatching the wrong resource in response to a 911 call could contribute to increased harm to callers.
• There is no other agency available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to dispatch. Without a "fourth option" available, dispatch options remain limited to police, fire or ambulance agencies.
• There is a lack of public awareness of, and familiarity with, existing health and social service agencies within the community that contributes to 911 calls that are non-urgent.
• There is a lack of integration and co-ordination.
• Legislative and regulatory barriers exist.
• There are also data sharing and measurement challenges.

Establishing a fourth "dispatchable" option would require the Winnipeg police and the fire paramedic service to "recast and reimagine the integration and operation of existing services within the Winnipeg Police Service and the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service."

This would involve co-ordination of the vulnerable persons unit and the emergency paramedic in the community (EPIC) program. 

The city's executive policy committee will vote next week on instructing the chief administrative officer, and the fire-paramedic and police chiefs, to continue the work recommended by the Bloomberg Harvard  study.