Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have a return to oral question asked by the Member for Nunakput on March 31st, 2021, regarding medevac services. The air ambulance service provider has been contracted to provide coverage for the entire Northwest Territories. The contract requirements include dedicated services such as aircraft, aircraft crew, and air medical crew available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to meet the demand of air ambulance transport requests.
To achieve this, in accordance with the performance requirements in the contract, the air ambulance provider has bases in Yellowknife and Inuvik. They provide a combination of medical crew and aircraft crew and three dedicated Yellowknife-based planes and one dedicated Inuvik-based plane to meet the demand of both in territory and out of territory patient transports.
At this time, the current combination of planes and crew has met both response time and service level benchmarks within the contract, and there is no need to consider exploring additional resources for the Inuvik base.
Simply expanding the number of planes available at the Inuvik base will not directly increase capacity to move patients across the NWT because of the complexity of matching and dispatching resources such as aircraft, aircraft crew, and medical crew to the air ambulance transport needs.
As an additional patient safety support, there is a contingency plan for additional resources that can be activated immediately to ensure critical transports are fulfilled as and when needed. The Department of Health and Social Services and the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority will continue to monitor the service level standards and response times against the contract. They commit to reviewing the contract requirements upon issuing a new contract or current contract extension to ensure all communities across the NWT continue to have appropriate access to emergency air ambulance services. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
