Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What precipitated my Member’s statement today and my oral questions was as a result of a search on our government careers website. Recently there was posted an advanced territorial support medical coordinator and an emergency medical dispatcher. When you look on the job description, it does mention to help emergency medical evacuation services including medevac triage, coordinating dispatching and repatriation of services. This prompted me to talk about it in my Member’s statement today, but, more importantly, to have questions today for the Minister of Health and Social Services.
In less than three weeks, Med-Response is going to go live. Can the Minister indicate what is the research basis for this new program and how is this program intended to improve what I talked about earlier, our current situation?
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Minister of Health. Mr. Abernethy.
Mr. Speaker, a significant amount of research has been done on this particular file. It started off with a different name many years ago, the Territorial Support Network. We’ve had physicians from across the North and we’ve had some real strong champions for this particular approach, and we have looked at other jurisdictions. This is going to give the community health care workers in the communities one point of contact for all medical emergencies, medevacs, all of those types of situations as opposed to what we’ve experienced in the past where every authority had their own plan, their own reporting mechanism, which often and was capable of leading to some real confusion out there with respect to coordinating all of these activities for the best interests of the patients. This will coordinate everything into one contact point.
Can the Minister indicate what the department’s position is on the provision of medevac flights to emergency extractions on our NWT highway system? Last time I asked this question with the previous Health Minister we didn’t have a clear policy. Can the Minister indicate, has this changed?
The Department of Health and Social Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of MACA are working together on a ground and highway rescue strategy. This particular EMR response tool is with respect to direct contact out of health centres to the regional centres, and we can coordinate things like medevacs out of there, but they will be going to the communities where there are airports as coordinated by the on-site people, the coordinator in the EMR office and a dispatcher in the EMR office. It will not be dispatching airplanes or helicopters to highway situations.
In this year’s budget, the Minister noted funding in the amount of $790,000 to continue the implementation of the new Med-Response service. As he quoted, it was to “provide community health care practitioners with remote emergency clinical support, triage advice and help to coordinate NWT air ambulance services.”
Can the Minister of Health indicate for these funding dollars, what overall improvements to the medevac service can Northwest Territories residents expect to see? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
These dollars are intended to provide 24/7 coverage in the office for our staff who will be providing the services. The significant difference and benefits for residents of the Northwest Territories – and our focus is on the people, the clients and our residents – is when somebody is injured in a community and they are in the health centre and they need immediate response, immediate action or immediate medevac, the community health worker or the community health care professional in that community will be able to call one office and that office will give them links to physicians or specialists. If we need to medevac them, there will be a medevac dispatcher on the phone as well.
So, all the people who need to be involved in the discussions to get that person to where they need to be or to provide them care on-site will all be on the same line providing advice. All of them will be informed, all of them will be able to provide the best level of care and, if medevac is needed, the most timely medevac for that patient. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you to the Minister. Once Med-Response is launched, can the Minister indicate what plans the department has to monitor and evaluate this program ongoing?
We will be putting in and developing an evaluation framework around this particular model to see how it’s working, to make sure it’s meeting the needs of our residents, patients and professionals in the individual communities. I’ve said it before and I’d love to say it again, I’d love to invite committee out to see staff and see the operations once we get it up and running. I ask for a couple of months, but then I’d love to invite the Social Programs committee out there to see the operations up and running. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
