Lac La Biche County is spearheading a $93,000 promotion and awareness campaign to address the impact the closure of the Edmonton City Centre Airport will have on medical air services.
County officials will be looking for support from 91 northern municipalities that may also be affected.
The campaign is expected to start in January and its costs would go down if other municipalities decide to join.
“We need Medevac services for our community, there’s no way around that,” Lac La Biche County Mayor Peter Kirylchuk said. “Until government or other agencies can show communities equal or better options, the communities need to be heard.”
Edmonton councillors decided to close the City Centre airport in 2009, and are in the process of planning of what to do with the space. This decision was met with criticism since the airport is close to the Royal Alexandra hospital and used by air ambulances flying in patients from rural communities across Northern Alberta.
The airport is run by the City of Edmonton, but this is an issue that involves not just Edmontonians, said Eugene Strilchuk, a director for Envision Edmonton, a group advocating to keep the airport open.
Medevac services is a provincial issue and the city’s hospitals were built using provincial and federal money, not Edmonton’s, Strilchuk said.
“We have world-class doctors and facilities here that were built with provincial money,” he said. “The (hospitals) weren’t built for Edmontonians, they were built for all of Albertans. And to say that we’re going to deny access, that isn’t correct.”
Concerns
highlighted if Medevac rerouted
A report done by the Health Quality Council of Alberta in April 2011 raised concerns about the possibility of Medevac patients being diverted to Calgary or services being rerouted to the Edmonton International Airport, which is further away from a hospital than ECCA.
“The main patient safety concern is that an increase in journey time for critically-ill Medevac patients could have a negative effect on their well-being,” states the report, which was requested by the Minister of Alberta Health and Wellness.
The report compared the time it would take to transfer patients from eleven different communities, finding that if services are rerouted to the international airport, the city will go from having some of the best transfer times to the worst.
Currently, it takes five minutes to get patients from the City Centre Airport to the Royal Alexandra Hospital and 13 minutes to the University of Alberta. From the International Airport, it would take 40 minutes to get to Royal Alexandra, and 31 minutes to the U of A, the report states.
Campaign plan
Although the airport debate and air ambulance service have been hot topics for more than a year, Lac La Biche councilors decided to re-ignite their opposition to the closure because the province has a new Health Minister after newly elected premier Alison Redford’s cabinet shuffle.
“I’m sure the new Premier and cabinet will take all reasoning to have the city airport remain open to Medevac services,” Kirylchuk said.
The campaign will lobby the provincial government, the City of Edmonton and the Edmonton Regional Airports Authority. It will also engage community members.
