Escorts who are medically required to accompany northern Manitoba patients on flights will still be able to buy airfare at a reduced rate.
This key point of clarification from the PC government allays fears that northern residents who are unfit to fly to Winnipeg alone might be denied assistance.
Under a provincial program, northern residents who must go to Winnipeg for non-urgent medical reasons, such as specialist appointments, receive a subsidy for travel by bus or private vehicle. Subsidies for bus fare are also offered to authorized escorts of the patient.
Patients who pay $75 out of pocket can upgrade from land travel to a commercial flight – a small fraction of the standard cost of an airline ticket.
If a physician deems an escort to be medically necessary, the escort
will also have this option, said Manitoba
Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness.
McGuinness recently told The Reminder that “the flight upgrade option will no longer be available for escorts,” but it was not made clear until now that medically necessary escorts will still enjoy subsidized airfare.
The province has long subsidized land and air travel under its Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP).
McGuinness said no changes are being made to NPTP, as the province is “simply enforcing the current policy.”
Authorized patients and escorts will continue to be eligible for land travel subsidies, she said.
Offering airfare subsidies only to medically necessary escorts is expected to save the health care system about $1 million a year, according to the province.
The province has yet to release a time frame for eliminating airfare subsidies when an escort is not deemed medically necessary.
Meanwhile, the PC government is scrapping an initiative designed to attract doctors to rural and northern Manitoba, promising to replace it with a more effective program.
The Medical Student/Resident Financial Assis-tance Program offers grants to medical students who promise to practise in Manitoba communities outside of Winnipeg that need physicians.
Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen told CBC that government surveys showed “money was almost never the motivating factor” for doctors in deciding whether to stay in a community.
In place of the assistance program, the province will “put together a more central, provincial strategy in terms of how do we attract and retain doctors,” he added.
Flin Flon MLA Tom Lindsey said the assistance program has helped Manitoba communities find new doctors and that doing away with it will make it more difficult for rural and northern residents to access high-quality health care.
In an NDP news release, Lindsey said that in the 2015-16 school year, 217 students across Manitoba received a total of $4 million in conditional grants through the program.
The former NDP government established the assistance program in 2001. The province expects to save about $4.2 million a year by cutting the initiative, according to CBC.
Grants for the Northern Remote Family Medicine Program, which helps send doctors to northern Manitoba, will remain in place, Goertzen confirmed to CBC.
