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A lot of anxiety has attended New Brunswick's move to a province-wide ambulance service. Stories of mis-directed and late ambulances have panicked residents in rural areas and cities alike.

The debate took a new turn this week, when health department officials stated that response times under the new single-operator system cannot be compared in any meaningful way to the response times of regional ambulance services. This contradicted an interview Health Minister Michael Murphy gave in May, in which he stated that Ambulance New Brunswick is meeting the old response times.

This flip-flopping has sent the service's critics off on a tear, demanding a comparison between the old service standards and new provincial guidelines. Many of those engaged in this discussion seem to be missing an important point.

Whether the new guidelines measure up to the old is an academic distinction. What matters to New Brunswickers is whether the new response times are fast enough to save lives, whether Ambulance New Brunswick can be depended upon to meet its benchmarks in nearly all cases, and whether the service's performance is improving over time.

Sorting through years of data from ambulance services that no longer exist would be an exercise in futility. To judge the value of this information, New Brunswickers would need to know how realistic each ambulance service's goals were. In some cases, ambulance operators met their benchmark times in only a fraction of cases; in others, the success rate was high. The raw figures cannot answer the most important question: whether ambulances responded quickly enough on average to save patients.

The Department of Health needs to focus its resources on assessing Ambulance New Brunswick's performance against real-world standards.

Are the service's benchmark response times realistic from a medical standpoint? Are they achievable in the real world of rural roads and provincial highways? Is the effectiveness of the service improving from quarter to quarter? Can efficiency be improved to save lives?

The service's critics are right about one thing: broad generalizations will not be enough to reassure New Brunswickers the ambulance system is working. The best assurance Health Minister Michael Murphy can offer is hard data documenting how Ambulance New Brunswick's service goals were set, whether the ambulance service is meeting its targets, and whether the target times are fast enough to save most patients.

By the time Ambulance New Brunswick issues its next quarterly report, the government should be prepared to provide specific answers about the service's performance, including an assessment of whether standard response times are fast enough.