Barrette: air ambulances will allow parents by month’s end
Change to medical evacuation procedure delayed by bureaucracy, minister says
A sharply worded letter to Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard Wednesday says sick Inuit children from Quebec’s Far North continue to be airlifted to Montreal on their own.
Health Minister Gaétan Barrette failed to make good on his promise to end the controversial practice that hurts northern Indigenous families, said the Quebec pro-medicare group Médecins québécois pour le régime public (MQRP), so they are taking their appeal calling for urgent action directly to his boss.
Quebec is the only province in Canada to systematically prevent a parent or guardian from accompanying their child during medical evacuations by plane.
With pressure mounting in the media, Barrette announced in February that he’s ending the practice common on the Challenger airambulance planes. Sick children are to be accompanied by a caregiver, he said. Yet months passed and terrified children continue to be systematically airlifted alone, the letter said.
Montreal Children’s Hospital emergency room physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain confirmed that not a single child has been airlifted to the Children’s or CHU Ste-Justine Hospital with someone to hold their hand.
Parents don’t understand why they are denied access on board, said the MQRP board of administrators, which is supported by 16 groups that signed the letter, including nurses, social workers, Indigenous and civil rights organizations.
“Why has nothing changed? Moreover, we have since learned that no written policy supports the refusal of parental support,” MQRP spokesperson Geneviève Bois, a family doctor who works at Cree Territory of James Bay, said in an interview. “This is not the first time we’ve supported the (#hand2hold) campaign. But we’re appealing directly to the premier now because nothing has changed. And if there was never a policy, medical staff and parents are asking, ‘ Why is this unjustified practice still going on?’ We felt we had to intervene.”
Barrette told the Montreal Gazette on Wednesday that bureaucracy has caused the delays. Changing regulations takes time, he said. The two Challenger jets are being reconfigured to allow for one caregiver aboard, “and all that remains now are the training protocols,” he said.
Parents and caregivers should be flying with their children by the end of the month, Barrette said.
Bois recalled that the Commission de droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse brought the matter to Couillard’s attention when he was health minister in 2005.
All critically ill children transported by Évacuation aéromédicales du Québec (ÉVAQ) on the Challenger jet face the ordeal of separation, but the practice disproportionately affects Inuit and First Nations children living in communities far from urban centres. The children of Nunavik are especially affected as the communities are not linked by road and the only way in and out of its 14 isolated villages is by plane.
The trauma of residential schools is still very raw for Indigenous families, Bois noted, and health professionals are painfully aware of having to tell parents they’ll have to send their children away alone.
The smaller planes that bring patients to local hospitals in Kuujjuaq or Puvirnituq allow for caregivers aboard. So Bois said she presumed that parents and guardians would not be refused on the Challenger. She said she hadn’t been working up north that long when she treated a gravely ill three-yearold toddler who had to be airlifted to Montreal.
“The hardest thing I had to do as a physician,” Bois said, was tell the mother she’d have to take the next commercial flight. The child, who didn’t speak English or French, screamed for her mother as she was being strapped to the ambulance gurney and carried away. “It was heartbreaking. It was a terrible thing to do. You want to do what’s medically best for the child, but this still haunts me today.”
It’s crucial for the physical and mental health of the child to have parents involved in all aspects of care, Bois said, so to bar them from transport is baffling.
The organization is asking Couillard’s government for a clear and explicit policy so that children are no longer airlifted solo, and those who are sent alone are rare occurrence, Bois said.
“We really hope to get a clear commitment,” Bois said. “It’s crucial to show people in the north that they will not be treated as second-class citizens.”
We really hope to get a clear commitment. It’s crucial to show people in the north that they will not be treated as second-class citizens.