[3] Emergency Medical Care Inc. (EMC) has been a service provider since the inception of the province-wide system in 1998,[4] which involved the amalgamation of 59 separate service providers across Nova Scotia to create a province-wide and integrated system.
The Extended Care Program: The main goal of an ECP[5] is to respond to non-emergency calls in nursing homes where they will assess and potentially treat patients on site.
This will reduce the need for some patients to go to hospital via ambulance and wait in the emergency department for several hours, thus creating a more personal approach to health care by allowing patients and their families to remain in a comfortable environment for as long as possible.
[6] The Clinical Support Desk: Historically,[7] a high volume of calls to EHS are non-emergency and as such, automatically dispatching an ambulance may not best address patient needs nor is it the best use of resources.
A first of its kind in Canada, a Clinical Support Desk (CSD) will handle these low-acuity calls.