The cost of transportation to and from Pontiac health care facilities has increased by around 60 per cent over the last five years, according to data acquired by THE EQUITY through an access to information request.

According to the table provided, the local health authority spent $205,010.82 on transport through several taxi companies in the 2015/16 fiscal year. Over the same time period in 2019/20, the total had surged to . . .

$328,903.49, an increase of more than $120,000.

Though the 2020/21 year is only partially over, the total has already reached $220,331.39, surpassing the full year’s expenditure only five years ago.

According to CISSSO media relations agent Marie-Pier Després, the needs have increased over that time period, but added that she didn’t have the details on the number of trips requested.

“The amounts that have been forwarded represent all the transportation requests that can be made by the various suppliers,” she wrote in an email. “This includes autonomous patient transport or adapted transport, parcel transport, picking, mail, small equipment, etc. This value represents all transportation whether it is to Maniwaki, Fort-Coulonge, Shawville, Gracefield, urban and even transportation to Montreal or Ontario.”

Elwyn Lang is the owner of Shawville Taxi, and his company takes on the majority of transportation for the local health care facilities with a fleet of four vans, two of which are wheelchair accessible. He said that he hadn’t noticed a significant increase in transport prior to the pandemic.

“There’s not much difference actually, it’s just more people going for tests … since COVID there is more traffic for sure, but I think because more people are getting tested for that,” he said.

“Some of that is probably because I have the second handicap van on,” he continued. “That makes a huge difference in who I can take to the city for tests,” he said.

Lang also said that the partial closure of the microbiology lab at the Pontiac Community Hospital (PCH) had caused an additional trip to the city to be scheduled every morning.

“That was an add-on here about a month ago,” he said. “We didn’t use to do that trip until about a month and a half ago.”

In addition to two daily trips to Gatineau, one in the morning and one in the evening, Lang said they also make two trips a week to the Wakefield Hospital to deliver medication from PCH’s pharmacy. They also pick up and drop off equipment from Wakefield that is sterilized in Shawville.

“I just take what I’m given,” he said. “That’s been going on for, I believe, five years or so.’

Lang’s drivers also makes a run to Buckingham once a week to deliver lab samples. On top of all the scheduled routes, they are on call 24/7 to transport anything from blood, to paperwork to patients, travelling as far as Ottawa or even Montreal.

“We do lots of STAT samples to the other institutions, could be [the Ottawa]Civic [Hospital], could be transfers anywhere … We do some trips to Montreal for people going for tests in Montreal that they don’t do in Shawville, but not a lot. Probably one a month over the year, but not many.”

He said that due to COVID, CISSSO had implemented some changes that helped to streamline the process.

“They centralize picking up samples, we just take them to one place in the hospital now … they have a person on staff at the warehouse in Hull and Gatineau that delivers them to where they’re going,” he explained. “We used to take them to say, pathology, to the lab, the pharmacy … we’d do all the deliveries in the hospital. Now it’s a centralized delivery system and it works … Some of the things they do really work well.”

He said he had sympathy for the coordinators that have to keep the massive supply chains for regional facilities running smoothly, especially with the added strain of a pandemic.

“People don’t realize that at two o’ clock or three o’ clock in the morning when the phone rings, you’re out of bed and you’re going to Hull in the middle of the night a couple nights a week,” he said. “The COVID samples, sometimes we’ll go down at seven o’ clock and you’ve got another one, so you come back and go again. It’s a lot.”

“This is not about CISSSO really, volume is up because people are older, they’re going to the hospital more than they used to … a whole multitude of different things,” he concluded.

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