 | Home page |  | Text size |  | E-mail this page |
Medevac response questioned Concerns remain about wait time for plane following boating accident in Trout Lake
Roxanna Thompson
Northern News Services
Published Thursday, June 13, 2013
SAMBAA K'E/TROUT LAKE
The community of Trout Lake is waiting for answers from the Department of Health and Social Services related to the response to the fatal boating accident that took place in the community last month.
The community has a number of questions and sent a formal letter to the department, said Alison de Pelham, a former Trout Lake resident who drafted the letter on behalf of residents.
Residents want to know why the emergency phone wasn't answered at the Fort Simpson Health Centre. The accident took place around 4:30 p.m. on May 22 and the first call from the Trout Lake health cabin to the emergency phone was made at 5:01 p.m., said de Pelham, adding she was told a number of calls were made to the emergency line and none were answered.
The RCMP was finally called to act as an intermediary to get someone to respond to the call, she said. De Pelham doesn't know when the call was finally returned.
The residents also have a number of concerns related to the medevac service including why a King Air, a plane that can't land at the Trout Lake airport because of the length of the runway, is used as the primary medevac plane. Further delays were caused while equipment was being loaded in a Twin Otter, said de Pelham.
There are also unanswered questions as to why residents were told a plane was on the way beginning at 6 p.m. when in reality, it had yet to depart Yellowknife, and why a medical team from Fort Simpson was not sent once the plane's delay and the severity of the accident were known.
Nothing they could do
The Twin Otter medevac arrived in Trout Lake just before 11 p.m. Seventy-seven-year-old Emily Jumbo, a passenger in one of the two boats that collided, had been revived with CPR following the accident. When the medevac arrived, medics determined there was nothing they could do for her, said de Pelham.
It was not suggested in the letter that Jumbo would have lived if the response was faster, she said.
"We're just saying why was the plane so late, why was the response so horrible," said de Pelham.
The medevac response to the boating accident did fall within the performance standards laid out in the medevac contract, said Debbie DeLancey, deputy minister for the Department of Health and Social Services.
The medevac contract is administered by Stanton Health Authority. Trout Lake is one of three communities, the others being Nahanni Butte and Jean Marie River, where the normal medevac aircraft, a King Air, can't land. In those cases the contract calls for a Twin Otter, but there is no Twin Otter permanently configured as a medevac plane on standby, said DeLancey, speaking on June 4.
The contract requires that a plane be dispatched within four hours of a call. In the Trout Lake incident, a plane was dispatched in just less than two hours, she said.
"From our perspective, the response time of the medevac was entirely within the standards and entirely appropriate," said DeLancey.
The department has, however, opened an investigation into why it took more than an hour for the Trout Lake health cabin to be able to contact the Fort Simpson Health Centre's emergency line. That wait wasn't acceptable, she said.
"We're looking into what happened, were there the proper protocols in place," said DeLancey.
The department is in the process of creating a dispatch service for the entire territory that it hopes will address problems related to emergency calls.
The service, which is expected to be launched as a pilot project this fall, will be a call centre affiliated with or located in Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife. Community health practitioners will be able to call the centre to speak with an emergency room physician at the territorial hospital. The service will also be responsible for medevac dispatch and triage.
Nahendeh MLA Kevin Menicoche said he is pressing Health and Social Services Minister Tom Beaulieu to review the policies and procedures related to medevacs in order to improve them as well as to create a way in which speedier access to health services and medevacs can be provided for the residents of Trout Lake, Nahanni Butte and Jean Marie River.
"I feel that it's unacceptable for our small and remote communities to have to wait that long," he said.
While a better plan is being created, Menicoche suggests a local airline company in the Deh Cho be used to medevac people as far as the Fort Simpson airport where the King Air could be waiting. People have lost confidence in the medevac service, he said.
Menicoche pointed to a second case in Trout Lake that occurred later in May when a man bypassed the medevac service and called a local airline company to fly his wife out of the community after her arm was badly cut with a saw. Menicoche said he will be following up with that case to make sure the man isn't stuck with the cost of the flight that the government should have borne.
Menicoche said he expects Trout Lake residents to raise the issue of medevacs with Beaulieu, who along with Minister Jackson Lafferty, will be visiting Trout Lake, Nahanni Butte, Fort Liard and Fort Simpson between June 24 to 25.
– with files from Laura Busch
| 
