Single manager named to air ambulance services
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Digital Subscription
One year of digital access for only $1.44 a week*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Billed as $5.77 plus GST every four weeks. After 52 weeks, price increases to the regular rate of $19.95 plus GST every four weeks. Offer available to new and qualified returning subscribers only. Cancel any time.
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional
$1 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*Your next Brandon Sun subscription payment will increase by $1.00 and you will be charged $17.95 plus GST for four weeks. After four weeks, your payment will increase to $24.95 plus GST every four weeks.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/10/2019 (2556 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The Manitoba government is consolidating oversight of all air ambulance services — including adult and child transport teams, STARS and Lifeflight — under a single manager at the provincial organization Shared Health.
Dr. Rob Grierson, Shared Health’s chief medical officer for emergency response services, will lead and manage operations of air ambulance services, with help from an associate medical director who has not yet been named.
Dr. Renate Singh, the previous medical director of Lifeflight, will still work as a physician with that team, but won’t lead them or work on scheduling. Singh said she doesn’t mind taking a step back and sees potential in the province’s consolidation plan.
“We’ll have the ability to actually be able to diversify our team complement,” she said Friday. “It actually is a really good thing.”
In a conference call Friday, Health Minister Cameron Friesen said the province had intended to make such a move since releasing a June 2018 health transformation blueprint and finally took the step this week.
Friesen noted Lifeflight was developed in the 1980s and could use a re-vamp as health care has changed significantly since then. The critical air ambulance service responds to calls in rural and northern Manitoba communities outside a 200-kilometre radius of Winnipeg.
Shared Health is examining ways to improve its air ambulance services generally, which Grierson said receive between 7,000 and 8,000 calls per year.
“There’s not always a consistent volume of calls coming through, but you need to develop a system that can literally fluctuate from having no calls in it for a critical care asset… (with) up to eight or nine calls in another day. You have to try to provide a system that can deal with those surges and in the current model under Shared Health as we move forward, that’s what we’re developing,” the doctor said.
There will be no Lifeflight job losses due to the consolidation plan, according to Friesen and Grierson. They reported that the Lifeflight nursing and physician team is now full as well, despite past issues with vacancies that affected scheduling and threatened to ground planes in the past.
jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca
Twitter: @_jessbu