Air Ambulances in Manitoba
The province
of Manitoba covers a large landmass, with very low
population densities outside of Winnipeg and Brandon.
Many of Manitoba’s smaller
communities have difficulty keeping a physician, so
residents with medical needs rely
on ambulance transfers to Winnipeg and Brandon for specialized
services that are not available locally.
All of the air ambulance resources in
Manitoba
are fixed wing, and virtually all flights are interfacility transports from
rural hospitals and nursing stations.
The air ambulance providers function at either basic
level or as a specialized service.
The five companies that work at the basic level provide air medical
transport to patients who are not critically ill but who still need to be
transported to a facility with greater medical capacity than the community
they reside in. At the
specialized level there is one provider, the Lifeflight program, which
provides advanced medical care to critically ill and injured patients in the
facility, and then transports by jet to health care centers with greater
medical capacity than the community the patient resides in.
Lifeflight provides state of the art critical care equipment, and the
medical teams consist of intensive care trained flight nurses, and emergency
or critical care trained physicians.
In most cases, Lifeflight picks up the patient and returns to
Winnipeg
for medical care..
Manitoba
has legislation to set the minimum levels for each provider of air ambulance
operation in the province.
The legislation is available on the internet, at:
http://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/e083e.php
The regulation is at:
http://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/regs/pdf/e083-020.06.pdf
There are six agencies currently licensed to provide
air ambulance transport.
Between these carriers, there were approximately
5,500 air ambulance transports last year.
Five of these agencies function at the basic level
operate on a fee-for-service basis.
The majority of air ambulance flights of provincial residents
originate from north of the 53rd parallel, where travel costs are
subsidized by a program that assists northern residents.
The sole provider at the specialized level, Lifeflight, is operated
by the provincial government, and it provides care and transport as a part
of the provincial health care system.
Because it is tax-payer supported, the user is not invoiced for
service. The aircraft, and all
of the expertise needed to operate it (pilots, maintenance, etc.) are
provided by Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation, and the medical
resources (nurses, medical director, etc.) are employed by Manitoba Health
and Healthy Living.
Currently,
Manitoba
does not have a central dispatch for air ambulance, but an assessment is
underway to determine how that function could best be introduced.
Due to a recent flooding emergency, Manitoba recently
utilized a rotary wing program to do primary calls and interfacility
transports. The STARS program
based in Alberta was contracted in
Manitoba
for a five week period during April 3, 2009 to May 8, 2009..
