It may not be a thousand-mile trip, but a group of committed Cochranites took the crucial first step this week on the long journey toward creating a new health care organization they hope will reflect the success of the Airdrie Health Foundation.
With that in mind, who better to share that story and provide inspiration than Michelle Bates, the Airdrie mother of five-year-old Lane, who died in 2009.
At a meeting in Cochrane Oct. 18, Bates explained how her personal tragedy led to her and others to form the Airdrie Health Foundation and ultimately, to lobby government to implement 24-7 urgent care service at the Airdrie Urgent Care Centre in 2017.
The foundation also contributes to other supplementary health-related services, such as youth programs, pregnancy programs, a mental health liaison team, training, palliative care, and education for health-care professionals.
After her shift in 2009 as a pharmacy technician at Peter Lougheed Hospital in Calgary, Bates returned home after 10 p.m. to find Lane with cold symptoms, but no fever. At first she wasn’t overly alarmed. But she had a feeling something wasn’t right.
“I thought I just want a doctor to see him. In Airdrie, urgent care was open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., so it was closed. Family doctors are closed, Peter Lougheed, Children’s Hospital, Foothills – 14 hour waits because it was the height of H1N1,” she said at the Cochrane meeting.
“After much discussion we decided, like many families, it’s not urgent, we’ll just wait for the family doctor. Sadly, Lane woke up later, in the middle of the night, and deteriorated really quickly and passed away.”
Bates said an emergency room visit might have been able to prevent the tragedy from happening. She now lives with the loss as best she can.
A subsequent scare with her daughter a year later again put the family into crisis mode. Not willing to wait for care, they decided, this time, to drive to Innisfail and Didsbury, where they eventually got the care they needed.
But the questions in Bates’ head remained – why doesn’t Airdrie offer adequate health services? Spurred by that question, she started to meet with elected officials, demanding to know why a town the size of Airdrie (which had population of roughly 40,000 people in 2010) didn’t have a hospital or at least 24-7 urgent care.
Meetings led to more meetings, and eventually the idea of forming the Airdrie Heath Foundation took root.
Bates recounted her experience to a group of concerned Cochranites gathered at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on Oct. 18 to discuss what they could do to materially improve health care in town.
During the question and answer period, an audience member stood up to address Bates.
“If you haven’t won the Order of Canada yet, I’d be happy to fill out the forms,” said John Parker, who has worked in health care for 40 years.
After the meeting, Parker went to the podium to sign the volunteer sheet to get involved in the organizational meetings that will be held to form what may eventually become a Cochrane health foundation similar to the one in Airdrie.
The population of Cochrane now is close to what Airdrie’s was when Bates made her pitch for a hospital or a 24/7 urgent care centre to health officials and the provincial government.
Originally from Ontario, where he said even towns of 20,000 residents have their own hospitals, Parker said it’s time to get to work locally. He noted it took Airdrie seven years to accomplish what he sees as something that is long overdue in Cochrane – 24/7 emergency care.
Parker started out as a nurse and eventually became a health-care executive, a position he has held in various locations around the world.
His is the type of background that Bates included in her advice on what qualifications to look for in new members of a health foundation, that ideally would be involved in everything from fundraising to providing advice to health-care providers, Alberta Health Services, and even politicians.
People have to have time, she advised, to attend meetings. They should be leaders and fundraisers. People with high-up contacts are valuable, along with health-care providers and lawyers, who can end up saving the foundation money on legal advice.
She saved the most important qualification for last.
“Being passionate is most important thing,” Bates said.
She encouraged the crowd not to be intimidated by fundraising, citing examples of how volunteers in Airdrie are “raising money with a smile and a cookie.” (The Airdrie Health Foundation has been the city’s recipient for local Tim Hortons’ Smile Cookie campaigns. This year’s campaign raised just under $50,000 for the foundation).
The Oct. 18 meeting was organized by the Cochrane EMS Crisis Community Action Group (CAG), which will now work its way through the nuts and bolts of forming the foundation.
The driving force behind the push to form the foundation is to establish 24-hour emergency care for residents of Cochrane and surrounding areas at the Cochrane Community Health Centre, but other functions could also be served, as they are in Airdrie.
After the talk, Brian Winter of CAG asked for people to sign up for the upcoming first formative meeting.
There are 69 health foundations supporting local health authorities in Alberta.
