Province to pay for rural ambulance transfers

Rural Manitobans will no longer have to pay ambulance fees for transfers to hospital if the care they need is not available at their local hospital, Health Minister Theresa Oswald said Tuesday.

The province announced $7 million will go towards funding the full patient cost of medically necessary inter-facility transports, effective Wednesday. The funding is not retroactive.

Winnipeg residents have not been paying for transfers, nor have northern patients who need to be sent to hospitals in the south.

"We have heard loud and clear from Manitobans who have said that currently there exists an unfairness and an inequity in what it might cost somebody who lives in Brandon, or who lives in Dauphin or Swan River, to take an ambulance from one facility to another," Oswald said in Brandon on Tuesday.

"We want to be fair and equitable, we don't believe that that should continue."

Until Tuesday, the province covered rural ambulance transfers only if the patient was returned to his or her original hospital within 24 hours.

Brandon West NDP MLA Scott Smith called the 24-hour rule "ludicrous," adding that some patients, through no fault of their own, would stay just a little longer than 24 hours and then behit with the ambulance bill afterwards.

"That 24-hour rule always drove me crazy. And in fact, the cost, period, drove me crazy. So now this is something, people don't have to worry about it," Smith said in Brandon Tuesday.

"Anybody that's impacted now, on a go-forward basis, will not have to worry about whether or not they have to be transported from rural Manitoba into Brandon, or from Brandon into Winnipeg, or from Swan River or Dauphin or anywhere else. We're going to get the health care that we deserve."

A medically necessary inter-facility transport takes place when a patient is being transferred between health-care facilities for treatment or diagnostic tests, or from "a more specialized level of care to another facility closer to home for rehabilitation or recovery," according to a government news release.