Thank you. I know the Member and all Members have expressed frustrations around medical travel in the past. I too have expressed significant frustration around medical travel. I think you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who hasn’t.
Part of the problem that we’ve had around medical travel is the clarity around it. It doesn’t seem to meet some of the people’s needs. With these changes that are coming forward, it will be more clear. We’ll clearly articulate it so it’s understood and applied consistently across the Territories. That in and of itself will reduce some of the complications that we have, but it doesn’t mean that less people are necessarily going to use it. But the points you made of the telehealth and whatnot, those types of things, we are seeing some results but we also continue to have many other reasons that people are coming out on medical travel.
I would like to point out that we did a soft launch of Med-Response and this is one of the initiatives we said we believe we are going to see some real positive results. We did a soft launch in November and we’re looking at going live next week with a full hard launch on Med-Response. Since their soft launch, and this was up to January 15th , they
coordinated 312 clinical consults from all authorities, 152 which were NWT air ambulance flights. They tracked nine calls that were initially requested in air ambulance dispatch, but after the conversation the work through Med-Response and the coordinator response didn’t actually result in a medical travel or an air ambulance call.
We’ve actually been able to already coordinate at least one aircraft to pick up two patients from different communities both going to Edmonton and return them on the same aircraft, getting some economies of scale by utilizing the same plane for more than one person. These are the types of things we know we will start to see more of as we go for a full hard launch on Med-Response. This is just one of the areas that we’re making progress and we’re starting to see some results. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out over time and whether or not there are even more opportunities to get some economies of scale and opportunities to
control some of our future expenditures in areas like this. So, there are good things happening.