As of 5:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, call takers for the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service (WFPS) have moved from a two- to five-priority dispatch system.

The system allows for more precise triaging of calls, matching each to an appropriate response.

“It’s our ability to spread those calls over greater priority to get the right care at the right time to the right patient,” WFPS Paramedic Operations & Training Deputy Chief Ryan Sneath told Global News.

Under the old system, calls were sorted into two categories: priority one, which are life-threatening, time-sensitive situations that get a lights-and-sirens response; and priority two, non life-threatening, but still urgent calls. About 75 per cent of calls fell into the first category, Sneath said, often because call takers couldn’t gather enough information over the call to classify them any other way.

“We see that number dropping to about 46 per cent with this initial change,” Sneath said.

Sneath says that will also reduce traffic accidents involving emergency vehicles as they speed to emergency scenes.

Under the new system, low acuity calls that don’t require medical intervention can be passed directly to the Downtown Community Safety Partnership (DCSP). The DCSP and WFPS have been working together this way over the past year, with about 12 calls per month being sent to the downtown nonprofit.

“We now have the ability for them to reach out to our community paramedic for clinical advice and clinical support for events they come across, so the communication and support goes both ways,” Sneath said.

That partnership is the first of its kind in Canada.

“This is kind of the first example that we know of in Canada… where a non-profit NGO is directly integrated with a municipal agency and trying to look out for folks,” DCSP Organizational Informatics & Research director Matthew Sanscartier said.

Sanscartier says other jurisdictions are taking note.

“We’ve done presentations for people in cities spanning Philadelphia, New York City, all the way to… Birmingham, Alabama,” Sanscartier said, “so there are other places that are looking at what we’re doing. We are sort of kind of like a canary in the coal mine.

“By working together, we’re more than the sum of our parts.”