Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When serious accidents happen, urgent rescue is required. In the field of medical triage they say, “time is tissue.” In some cases minutes, let alone hours count and lives do hang in the balance. People in the Northwest Territories still don’t have 911, but they do have a reasonable expectation that if they or their loved ones are hurt, they will be transported with haste to the nearest suitable medical facility.
Unfortunately, we are hearing of too many instances where medevacs are not being provided in a timely manner, and with disastrous results. Just last week we heard from Mr. Yakeleya and he spoke of a heartbreak of one of his constituents by the failure of a local health centre to make the right call in transporting a constituent who had been seriously injured in a skidoo accident.
Last year Member Menicoche spoke about two serious accidents in Trout Lake affected by delayed medevac services. The first, a boating collision where an elder died before the arrival of a medevac plane, which took almost six hours to get to the scene.
A Trout Lake resident who rendered assistance to the victims of this boating accident happened to find himself at an unfortunate scene of another accident. This time it was his wife who injured herself with a skill saw. When staff at the health centre told him they would need to seek approval to medevac his injured wife, this gentleman, knowing full well how critical a delay could be, called for air transportation himself, rather than risk the wait. He was then struck with the worry that he would be billed for a flight that should have been paid by the GNWT.
Another accident took place in 2013 near Fort Providence, leaving two dead and another seriously injured. This highlighted the problems resulting from the lack of a clear policy on emergency highway extraction. In this case, a waiting helicopter crew was told to stand down while the severely injured truck driver was driven to Fort Providence before being flown by medevac to Yellowknife and then finally on to Edmonton.
Clearly, there are many problems with medevac services. Decision-makers are not always clear about who has the authority to make the call on a medevac. Too often, decisions are being made by staff without the appropriate credentials. It also appears that the cost is being factored into decision-making when the severity of a patient’s condition should be the only consideration.
Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
The Minister of Health and Social Services has advised this House that his department is moving forward with Med-Response, a program that will give all the health centres and all the communities direct access to a physician to coordinate expediting of medevacs, which is going forward, as we were told, on April 1st of this year.
Clearly, the sick and injured in the Northwest Territories deserve better service than they are getting.
At the appropriate time, I will be asking the Minister of Health and Social Services questions about the status of this proposal. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
