Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today, once again, to shine a light on my Member’s statement and oral questions from Monday, February 25, 2013, on the subject of air ambulance protocol for highway emergencies and the role of medical travel. Admittedly, I am fully aware of an ongoing RCMP review of last week’s highway accident and I will refrain from asking specifics to this file.
Upon review of the responses of the Minister of Health and Social Services, it bears to ask, once again, some questions. The Minister of Health and Social Services indicated, as per Hansard, “I’m not familiar with the protocols for getting people on the highways.” He also states, “All calls for medical travel, whether it be medevacs or medical travel, are made by physicians.” So the Minister has had a few days now to familiarize himself with protocols. Therefore, can the Minister of Health and Social Services explain what protocol does a medical travel physician use when aborting an air ambulance extraction versus a more lengthy ground transport option?
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The protocol, as I understand it, does not specifically speak to air rescue services by a chopper or by a float plane. I wasn’t advised officially by anyone that a chopper was originally called in and asked not to go to the site. I checked into that to see if there was anything within medical travel, within medevac, to see if there was something in there on how we pay for rescue with choppers. In that category it indicated that anything outside of the communities where there would be a requirement for a float plane or a chopper there was nothing in the policy that spoke to that.
Thanks to the Minister. If there is no protocol or policy, my question is quite simple. What is being used by the physician who works for medical travel to make such decisions?
In extreme circumstances, working between the Department of Health and Social Services, the health and social services authorities, RCMP, military, they may elect to use one of those modes to rescue, to assist people who are injured, but these are made strictly on a case-by-case basis by the parties involved. During the time there is an incident and the key people are brought together, the call is made on a case-by-case basis and not within the policy. It’s on a case-by-case basis.
We’re finally getting to the meat of the matter here. We’ve heard from the Minister today that it’s a case-by-case basis, and a call is made, but we don’t know by whom. It seems we are at an impasse on sharing with the residents of the NWT a clear pathway and roadmap of medical travel, especially on our road and highway air ambulance situations.
Can the Minister of Health and Social Services provide all these protocols and table this information for the public to see?
There are no clear protocols. I indicated that. It would be difficult for me to provide protocols around this when there are no clear protocols. I think that the system, the government recognizes this as a gap in the system, when we’re trying to determine how we’re going to perform rescue on a place like a highway, as an example.
With that in mind, we had put together the Interagency Working Group that is led by the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs working with the Department of Transportation and ourselves, Health and Social Services, so that we could develop a system that would allow us to use ground ambulance, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at. With that, we had to ensure that we removed some of the barriers. Some of the barriers were the fact that emergency medical service responders may not be insured to be handling injured people on the highway. So the first thing we have to do is give those people the comfort by developing a legislation that will allow them to get insurance so they can assist people on the highway. We can’t have people who are not insured, not covered, handling injured people on the highway. So we need to put some of these things in place before we proceed any further.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve heard today, finally, that there are no clear protocols or policies and we’ve heard from the Minister directly that there are gaps in the system. This leads to my final question.
It’s clear that we need a forensic review of medical travel and the fact that this should have been completed years ago as promised to the Auditor General of Canada, Ms. Sheila Fraser. So I’m rising here again today and raising awareness of this requirement. When will this Minister complete the review of medical travel, medevac operations and protocols, and table this with committee?
As the Members know, and I’ve been saying, we are working on revising medical travel or trying to make medical travel a better program that addresses the issues and needs of the people of the Northwest Territories. I do believe the review is complete. It’s a matter now of putting together what information we have in order to revise medical travel to make medical travel better. I’m only recalling this because I have the information here but no time to pull it out for that specific question. I believe the review is done and that we are now moving to areas that need to be addressed. We know there are many areas. This is one area. There are areas on how we handle seniors, on how we handle persons with disabilities and so on within that travel policy, the whole thing about medical escorts, non-medical escorts and so on. The whole review is complete, but now it’s a matter of taking that policy and developing something that is an improvement to what we have now.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
