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Medevac response time 'unacceptable' Emergency responders took five hours to arrive after Trout Lake boating accident
Laura Busch
Northern News Services
Published Monday, June 3, 2013
SAMBAA K'E/TROUT LAKE
A medevac plane called to Trout Lake after a boating collision just outside the community fatally injured a 77-year-old woman took five hours to arrive - a time Nahendeh MLA Kevin Menicoche says is unacceptable.
Emily Jumbo was travelling in an 18-foot Lund with two family members, a 73-year-old man and and eight-year-old girl on Island River when their vessel collided with a jet boat captained by a 46-year-old male.
Jumbo was given CPR at the scene and revived. She was then transported to the medical centre in Trout Lake where she eventually succumbed to her injuries.
Menicoche and Jumbo's family want a full inquiry into why help took so long to arrive, the MLA told News/North on May 30.
Initially, calls from the health centre to the emergency line in Fort Simpson went unanswered. Once the medevac was alerted to the situation, it took five hours to arrive from Yellowknife. In the meantime, no updates were given to those waiting at the health centre, said Menicoche.
"It should have never taken five hours and it also seems they weren't advising the health centre that they were being delayed, or anything like that. They just waited 30 minutes, and then another 30 minutes, and so on," he said. "The facts are glaring."
"This kind of response time is unacceptable," said Menicoche in the legislative assembly on May 29. "It undermines our residents' faith in the medevac system and our health system."
In fact, since the incident, one man from Trout Lake opted to charter a plane himself rather than wait for a medevac after his wife sustained a serious cut on her arm from a skill saw, Menicoche said.
Menicoche wants to see this couple reimbursed for the cost of that flight.
The department should set up standardized times for medevacs to all NWT communities so people know how long they need to wait for help, he said.
On May 29, Menicoche asked minister of health Tom Beaulieu to outline what the wait time should have been
for the medevac plane - a question the minister could not answer.
"It would be difficult to put a time frame on a specific community because it would depend on the type of aircraft," said Beaulieu.
The King Air medevac plane that was initially scheduled to respond to the emergency was ruled to be unfit to land at the Trout Lake airport - which is a fairly small facility with a gravel
runway. Instead, it decided to send a Twin Otter, which took "a fair bit of time" to equip.
The construction of a new airport is currently underway.
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