A significant amount of money is coming to Riverside Health Care facilities to help them realize a dream that’s been years in the making.
During a stop in Fort Frances on Wednesday, Kenora-Rainy River MPP Greg Rickford announced that Riverside Health Care would be receiving two funding packages in the near future. The first to be announced was more than $500,000 to assist with covering expenses incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the second announcement will likely wind up being the more visible of the two, as MPP Rickford announced $100,000 for the development and preparatory work for the building of a helipad for air ambulance service directly to and from La Verendrye General Hospital.
“This heliport will allow pad to pad air transportation between hospital sites for patients requiring care across northern Ontario and beyond,” Rickford said during his announcement.
“The new heliport will also improve the availability of land ambulance services and enable timely response to critically ill patients in Fort Frances and the surrounding areas to the places that they need to go.”
Rickford noted that the drive for a helipad at La Verendrye is something he’s been actively involved with since his early days in office.
“This was a petition that I had made fairly early on, realizing that there was no heliport here,” he said.
“Some good people had worked on it but it had fallen on deaf ears in Toronto under the previous government and I took this to the ministry of health and said, ‘look, Kenora-Rainy River is almost the size of the United Kingdom, every town and city that has a hospital ought to have a heliport.’ This is going to enable us to move critically ill, critically injured people from Fort Frances to Winnipeg or to Thunder Bay quickly.”
The initial funding announcement was less flashy than a helipad, but it will go towards helping Riverside cover extra costs that have come up due to procedures and other services being pushed down the line due to the impacts of COVID-19.
“Like many other hospitals in Kenora-Rainy River, we not only meet the normal demands of a vast region in the context of COVID, we faced additional challenges, additional pressures,” Rickford said.
“Our government recognized that, and as part of this years funding, Riverside Health Care Facilities is receiving an additional $540,000 in funding for the fiscal year 2020-21, a 1.9 per cent increase to meet current and future demands for regular services… as part of Ontario’s Action plan responding to COVID-19, we knew that there would be challenges in reopening, so we’re pleased to announce province-wide significant resources to support hospitals in meeting their current and future demands for regular services. There’s no doubt a backlog as hospitals have been a little quieter in some respects, and a little busier in others dealing with the nuances of COVID-19.”
The funding for the two announcements come from different provincial streams designed to assist health care in the province, and administration staff at Riverside Health Care noted that both of them will do good things for Fort Frances and the Rainy River District at large.
“Certainly funding that allows us to sustain core and critical hospital services is essential but recognizing, as he alluded to earlier, the excitement around evolving and developing a helipad and moving the planning forward is an absolutely astounding accomplishment for this organization,” said Henry Gauthier, Riverside Health Care President and CEO.
“We look forward to a helipad actually moving onto the next level, implementation, and hopefully that happens over the next year or two. I recognize it’s a busy time, certainly given COVID-19 and reopening, not just in health care and other public sectors, but across the private sector and we really appreciate [MPP Rickford] taking the time to come here today to provide this announcement.”
While Gauthier was unable at the time to provide concrete numbers on how frequently the hospital makes use of air ambulance services, he said they anticipated the helipad could be used two to three times a week. Both he and Julie Loveday, the vice-president of clinical services and chief nursing executive, explained that having a helipad close to the hospital is crucial for some urgent and critical patients, as right now patients must be transported out to the airport.
“The helipad is huge for clinical services because it will provide access to care quicker for all of our residents in our community,” Loveday said.
“Ultimately, an example of an issue we deal with is neonates. So if a baby is born prematurely we need to transfer them to a tertiary care centre, often that can be Winnipeg or Thunder Bay depending on how far along the mom is. We often end up delivering those babies here, and we do a very good job of it, but this will give them quicker access because the whole transportation issue can be a huge issue for us here and it can leave us in predicaments where we’re not able to transport those patients out.”
Not only is the time from hospital to airlift significantly reduced, but Loveday noted that rather than requiring a special advance crew to transfer the patients, transfers to an on-site or nearby helipad means that a staff physician can assist in taking the patient to the helicopter.
“We talked about the importance of making sure we can make our response timely, having a helipad right next to the hospital saves time when transporting patients into La Verendrye as well as from La Verendrye to our regional centres,” Gauthier said.
“What this does is it reduces the time of transporting from the airport to hospital and back, and that can be critical, certainly from a care perspective.”
Additionally, Gauthier said that a helipad at La Verendrye wouldn’t mean that fixed-wing air ambulances from the Fort Frances Airport would stop being used, but would instead be used “to support non-urgent transports, repatriations, and some emergencies.”
Construction of the helipad is expected to take one to two years to complete following the completion of the design and prep work, and Gauthier said Riverside is currently considering three different locations for the final site of the helipad with two being located nearby and one attached to the hospital itself.
