Airlifting sick kids: Quebec to allow family member on plane
Ends controversial practice that’s been source of criticism since the 1970s
Responding to mounting pressure from physicians, Indigenous leaders and child-advocacy groups, Quebec backed away from its controversial system of airlifting sick children to hospitals without their parents.
“What is obvious is that a parent should be allowed to accompany a child,” Health Minister Gaétan Barrette told the Montreal Gazette Thursday after touring a Challenger jet, the “hospital plane” used to take sick children from remote regions.
It’s not a matter of “changing our minds” but of having the right information about air regulations on passengers, Barrette said of a policy that has been in place since the ’70s despite many requests for change.
Across Quebec, 75 per cent of air ambulance evacuations allow a parent to come along. But in Nunavik, where 100 per cent of medical evacuations are via two Challenger jets, parents were routinely denied because of space restrictions. Physicians and child advocate groups said the current medevac practice is offensive, cruel and barbaric. No parent should be separated from their child during a medical crisis.
Parents had to let their children fly alone thousands of kilometres, not knowing if they would survive the flight to a hospital. In some cases, the child died during transport.
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in the country to routinely deny parents the possibility of accompanying their sick children, said the Quebec and Canadian pediatric societies, adding their voices to a call to fix an antiquated policy of barring parents. The societies backed a campaign by three Montreal Children’s Hospital physicians who wrote the government in December urging the health minister to reconsider a policy that disproportionately affects northern Inuit and First Nations communities.
Following many complaints about the practice, plus a petition calling for its abolition, Barrette last week ordered managers of the medical evacuation system to examine alternatives and report back to him.
“I said I would check it out. And it appears that the information I got (about air regulations) was wrong,” Barrette said. Quebec will now harmonize its regulations with other Canadian provinces, he added.
The regulations stipulate that the pilot decides who gets on based on a risk assessment.
A caregiver will be denied for safety issues, for example, if the parent is intoxicated, has a restraining order prohibiting contact, is ill or could pose a risk.
The timeline is expected be about one month, Barrette said.
However, one of the two jets servicing the area is an older model that flies less often. It may need to be removed from circulation to have its seating adjusted to accommodate a passenger, which will affect the government’s capacity to service the area, and a decision on that is pending, he said.
“If we can’t take it out of service for a year, about 90 per cent of the time a parent will (still) be on the plane to go down south,” Barrette said.
Barrette’s announcement is extremely encouraging given it can be implemented quickly, said Canadian Paediatric Society presidentelect Catherine Farrell, a physician in Ste-Justine’s intensive care unit. “Also, we’re not doing something unusual, just ensuring Quebec children are getting the same benefits as other children in Canada.”
Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, who noted the medevac practice was particularly offensive to those who lived through the residential school era and the Sixties Scoop, also called the expected changes encouraging.
“But I will celebrate the first day a jet arrives with a child and their parent together.”
For Children’s emergency room physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain, one of the three doctors spearheading the campaign, the “draconian policy” should have been abolished yesterday.
“The immediate implementation of a family-friendly policy is long overdue, but nothing can undo the traumatic experiences of all those kids who have been unaccompanied all these years,” he said. “Even in the last few weeks ... Indigenous kids from northern communities have continued to be transferred for emergency medical care without accompaniment.”