WINNIPEG – Air ambulance services won’t resume until the provincial government is sure medical concerns are addressed, Health Minister Erin Selby said Wednesday morning.
The Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society air ambulance was suspended Dec. 2 following the death of a patient. A review of the case was ordered.
“There is no timeline right now of when we hope to have a helicopter ambulance back up in the air,” Selby said. “We’re waiting for the critical incident review. We have been told that it should be available in the new year.”
On Tuesday a spokesperson for STARS told Global News the service was expected to resume in January.
Many have been critical of the suspension of air ambulance service, particularly in rural Manitoba, where vehicular ambulances are stationed farther apart and hospitals are less well-equipped than in cities.
La Broquerie Fire Department Chief Alain Nadeau voiced his concern about the suspension of STARS service following the death of Jordan Crookes, 16, in a snowmobile crash in rural Manitoba on Saturday.
“I’m not the professional that’s going to say that STARS would have saved his life, but I cannot believe that during probably the worst season for crash trauma that STARS program is grounded,” Nadeau said after the accident.
The accident happened about two kilometers from Highway 30 and emergency responders had to find snowmobiles and other patient-transportation equipment to get into the bush while CPR compressions continued on the teen, the fire chief said.
“STARS is the perfect setup for the rural areas and we’ve grounded it,” he said. “It’s all we have in the rural areas.”
But Selby said she has been assured by her staff that grounding STARS has not had a big impact.
“We’ve had six incidents since STARS was grounded where it would have been called out. In all of those cases, they were served by a land ambulance, a vehicle, and our department assures us that that was done in a comparable time,” the health minister said.
The decision to suspend service was made on the advice of medical staff, she said.
The woman whose Nov. 28 death prompted the suspension of service appeared to have died after she wasn’t given sufficient oxygen, officials have said – a problem also seen in earlier critical incidents involving STARS.
Those previous critical incidents had resulted in new protocols for STARS and one of them wasn’t followed on the Nov. 28 flight, officials suggested. They wouldn’t specify which protocol wasn’t followed.
The concerns raised by the Nov. 28 incident must be addressed, Selby said.
“Safety is the main priority for us,” she said. “Any plan that we do put together to have it back in service is going to have to be signed off by the medical professionals. They’re going to have to let us know that the plan is safe and that the concerns they had have all been addressed and fixed.”
STARS spokesman Colin Fast said the suspension hasn’t affected the air ambulance service beyond not being able to respond to calls.
Staff is still on duty, pursuing professional development opportunities, and donors continue to tour their Winnipeg Airport base, Fast said.
“We’d be ready to go back into service in about eight minutes, if necessary,” he said. “Everybody here is looking forward to getting back in service.”
Any improvements recommended following the critical incident review will be welcomed, he added.
Fast said he couldn’t comment on whether the service could have made a difference in Saturday’s snowmobile accident because he doesn’t know the specifics of the case.
STARS dispatch restrictions
The following six dispatch restrictions were placed on STARS following a critical incident, a health spokesman said in an email. Officials have said one protocol wasn’t followed in the critical incident that prompted the suspension of STARS service:
- “All transports involving children less than12 years of age must be done with a physician on board the STARS aircraft. The only exception to this would be scene-response cases, which fall into the auto-launch criteria. There was a physician on board during the second and most recent critical incident.
- “STARS will only be dispatched to calls beyond the 50-minute helicopter emergency medical services zone (such as a location like Brandon) if Lifeflight is on another call elsewhere and if the patient is believed to be stable enough for transport by a nurse/paramedic team. The exception to this condition would be certain types of emergent transport, and/or the inability to reach the Lifeflight physician for triage purposes.
- “Calls outside the STARS’s fly radius must be triaged by a Lifeflight physician. STARS must implement the medical direction provided by the Lifeflight physician.
- “All calls must be triaged by a Manitoba physician, and the STARS Emergency Link Centre will not be involved in the co-ordination of any Manitoba inter-facility transports. If the STARS physician or medical director is unavailable, the Lifeflight physician will triage the call and approve the mission, if appropriate.
- “Any call that may result in the transport of neonatal patients must be immediately triaged by the Health Sciences Centre (HSC) neonatal transport team.
- “Physician consultations, bed locations services and any other services offered by STARS that do not have the express permission of the emergency medical services branch of Manitoba Health may not be conducted.”
— With files from Brittany Greenslade and Megan Batchelor
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