It was a relatively quiet summertime shift in the emergency room at Montreal children’s hospital when the child – an Inuk preschooler – was rushed in on a stretcher. He had been airlifted in from a remote community after a motor vehicle accident, and he was entirely alone. Suddenly he began to cry. We couldn’t speak his language, and couldn’t find a hospital interpreter. Had he developed a sudden headache? Should we rush him to the CT scanner?
While trying to figure out how to proceed, we found someone who spoke Inuktitut, and learned the heartbreaking reason the child was crying: he missed his mother, who had to stay behind, more than 1,500km away.
Hundreds of critically ill children in remote northern communities are flown by ambulance planes to pediatric emergency centres in Montreal or Quebec City every year. And yet the Quebec Aeromedical Evacuations (Évaq, in its French acronym) – the provincial entity responsible for medical air transport – won’t let caregivers join them. Instead, parents must take a commercial flight, often several days later depending on flight schedules, seat availability and weather.
This is heartbreaking and incredibly dangerous to do. Catching symptoms early often leads to a better recovery, and nobody knows the child better than their own family. It is absolutely senseless that Quebec allows this to be done to these families.
It also places a financial burden on a family who are already faced with the possibility of paying for medical supplies for their child. But they also have to fork out money for a flight? Most people don’t just have that cash lying around. Especially when prices of food and necessities in Canada’s north can be obscenely high as well.
Separating sick Inuit kids and parents is medical colonialism all over again
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