'The mission is the patient'
Northern experience sparks medical business venture
Walter Strong
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, December 3, 2014
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
One little known fact about of Northern mining projects is the role they played in the development of a young company that specializes in taking former military medics from the front lines of overseas operations to mining and industrial camps in the North and across Canada.
Frontline Medics Inc. VP of Operations Tom Asham, left, and Dr. Ken Jenkins, Frontline Medics CEO and medical director at the 2014 Yellowknife Geoscience Forum trade show. Ashman and Jenkins founded Frontline Medics after careers in the military. Not only did Ashman and Jenkins help develop a recognized civilian designation for military medics, but their company hires ex-military medics for placement in remote industrial locations. - Walter Strong/NNSL photo |
Frontline Medics Inc., with a location in Yellowknife was founded in 2008 by Tom Asham and Dr. Ken Jenkins. Between 80 and 90 per cent of their medical staff are military veterans, with many placed in the North.
Ashman retired a chief warrant officer and his more than 28 years of service included multiple tours of duty in active conflict or crisis zones including Haiti, the Persian Gulf, Somalia and Bosnia.
Jenkins' military career included senior positions within the Canadian Forces including senior medical Officer at NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen in Germany, and command surgeon at Air Force headquarters in Winnipeg.
"When I retired, I came up to Yellowknife to work in the North," Ashman said. "That inspired me to say to Ken (Jenkins), 'look, we can take what we learned in the military and bring veterans out here and put them in industrial settings.'"
Ashman said the similarities between working as a medic in a military conflict zone and working as a medic in a remote and isolated mine site are abundant.
"It's essentially the same thing, except there is no military conflict," Ashman explained.
"The real similarities are that you're isolated and you have limited resources. We're trained as field medics to be comfortable in those harsh environments. We're used to being in small camps where you have regimental settings, anywhere from 400 to 1,200 men."
"These are very similar to the demographics and population at a mine site," Ashman added. "The commonality is the isolation and fact that you're it, you have to be very resourceful."
Although it seems a natural fit to have former military medics stationed in remote mining camps - Frontline Medics has contracts with both De Beers and Dominion Diamond Corporation - there was a time when military medics had no civilian equivalent qualifications.
"It wasn't necessary," Ashman said. "There was no reason to have our medics or our PAs (physician assistants) recognized because we served our own organizational needs," Ashman said.
But this also meant qualified ex-military medics had no civilian certification that qualified them for positions in civilian settings.
"I said this is ridiculous, we have a critical shortage of health care providers, and we're as good as anybody else out there but we're not recognized," Ashman said.
While still in the service, he set about to change this and successfully lobbied to have military PAs gain Canadian Medical Association
certification.
"Tom (Ashman) was the founding president of the Canadian Association of Physician Assistants," Jenkins said.
"Tom was the spark plug that got everything going. He was instrumental in getting the processes in place to have the profession recognized."
Jenkins described PAs as similar to nurse practitioners, but with a different scope of practice.
"It's ideally suited to remote and austere environments," Jenkins said.
Frontline Medics provides round the clock physician consult for all their PAs should the need arise.
With 22 personnel across Canada, Frontline Medics is slowly expanding their presence. The Yellowknife office was opened more than a year ago and employs one full-time nurse practitioner on-site.
The local office, located downtown at the LCP Health Building, provides on site occupational medical assessments, fitness for work assessments, drug and alcohol testing, audiograms and whatever medical screening a person might need to get work at a mine site.
Frontline Medics' corporate office is near Kingston, Ont.
"It's wonderful to see that we can serve our country in a different way," Ashman said. "We're used to working in teams, we leave our egos at the door. It doesn't matter what your role is, whether your a physician, a medic or a radiologist, the mission is the patient."
