Retired paramedics stepping up to help get patients to appointments in Manitoba’s Interlake region

During the pandemic, many patients in need of medical transport for diagnostics, dialysis, and other procedures were not getting to their appointments due to a lack of transport services, but one team of retired paramedics began a service to change that.

John Mackay, a retired paramedic for over 25 years, saw there was an immediate need.

“These patients were not getting to their appointments, they were not getting home from Winnipeg when they were admitted for procedures, or they were being discharged and coming back to their own region,” explained Mackay, owner and operator of Community Paramedics Service Inc.

Mackay says they made an agreement with the Interlake Eastman Regional Health Association in May of 2022 to provide necessary help. He assembled a team 16 licensed paramedics who are either retired or off-duty. They have since completed over 6,000 medical transports from all across southern, Interlake, and western areas of Manitoba.

“The transportation problems for these patients that have to get where they’re going, not life and death, but critically important, were solved.”

Mackay says they continued to transport patients until the province imposed regulations of the Emergency Response and Stretcher Transportation Act. They were told they couldn’t transport patients from hospital to hospital.

“The same patient that could be in the East Gate Lodge in Beausejour, if their doctor decides they need a CT scan, we can transfer them to Selkirk for the CT scan. If they happen to be in the hospital three blocks away in Beausejour, and a doctor says they need a CT, we can’t take them from the hospital, according to the regulators,” he explained.

Mackay and his team continue to make several medical transports every single day but are doing so privately. 63-year-old Norman Peresky sustained a back injury when he was 21 and is bed-ridden because of it. Through a stretcher service, it costs Peresky $1,620 every time he needs to go for an appointment. Mackay charges $150 for the same service.

“If he was gone, that would be a big problem for me,” said Peresky. “It’s a reclining wheelchair and it reclines back. That is how I am transported, and it is $1500 cheaper, and I can handle it. It’s basically almost like being in a stretcher.”

Peresky has been unable to work since he was 33. He says he’s living off an inheritance from his late brother. Peresky says he is worried Mackay’s service will be shut down.

“I’d be financially strapped and terribly financially broke. I wouldn’t have the convenience of going to my doctors appointments. The ambulance is not set up for this, where john is. That’s what he does. He transports people.”

Shared Health tells CityNews that Mackay’s company is not a contracted service provider for Shared Health and would not confirm whether or not there has been an increase in appointment cancellations due to a lack of medical transport options in rural Manitoba.

“I would say that they need to take a good look at the autonomy that a region has to go about doing its business in health care and serving patients, because the patients now are not getting to their appointments,” said Mackay.