(This is a slightly edited version of a letter to Health Minister Adrian Dix that was copied to Coast Reporter.)
Dear Minister:
Your Ministry’s efforts to improve our broken medical system are greatly appreciated. As part of these efforts it would be useful if you would also address problems encountered by “medical travellers” in the province. As you are aware, many residents of smaller, more remote communities are forced to take specialized treatment in larger medical centres. For residents of the Sunshine Coast, the centres are mainly in Vancouver and North Vancouver. The information provided to these patients about the ferry services available to them and treatment for which they are being scheduled is quite inadequate.
Patients from the Coast visit Vancouver for consultations with specialist physicians, operations, and a wide range of services from MRI and other diagnostics to chemotherapy, radiation treatment and so on. Cancer patients and other seriously ill patients are often required to make the trip (usually by ferry) on a daily basis for a month or more.
Often patients are kept in the dark for many months on end about what is being planned for them. I believe it would make a lot of patients much happier if your Ministry were to set up a systematic way of keeping patients fully informed, in a timely way, of planned treatments. One possibility would be to create a website providing a secure file for each patient.
BC Ferries provides at least two types of assistance to “medical travellers.” The Medical Services Plan Travel Assistance Program (TAP) provides free ferry service to eligible patients and where needed an escort. Although not widely publicized, most people on the Coast are aware of it. The second service provides for priority boarding for “medical passengers,” the so-called “medical assured loading” program. Information on this program is not widely disseminated. I learned of it from a friend who had to travel to Vancouver every day for 36 days for radiation treatment. It was only after 15 or 16 days that he learned (also from a friend) of the program and was able to take advantage of it. More publicity would have made his life a lot more comfortable.
There are also certain aspects of the TAP program which are bureaucratic and cause unnecessary suffering. In particular its users are required to arrive at the toll booth at least one hour before departure time. Often in the summer and during holiday weekends, traffic is backed up far up the approach road at Horseshoe Bay and it could take an hour or so just to reach the toll booth. As the ferries to and from the Coast generally run every two hours, passengers could have a two-ferry wait in busy times. So a patient (such as those receiving daily radiation or chemotherapy) could have a very long wait indeed. In another example of bureaucracy, a patient who has to make several consecutive daily visits using TAP must make a separate phone call to obtain approval for each trip.
What is needed here is much more publicity, an end to the one-hour rule and a free reservation system for “medical passengers” that provides the flexibility patients need. After all, apart from the cost, patients cannot make normal reservations as they rarely know when their hospital or other medical treatment will end.
David Buxton, Sechelt
