BY NORM TOLLINSKY
Without a helping hand from Northern Ontario-based Bearskin Airlines and Hope Air, the Harten family of Sault Ste. Marie would have put close to 45,000 kilometres on their vehicle over the course of some 27 round trips to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.
Seventeen-year-old Kelseigh Harten was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at the age of six. “It was just out of the blue,” recalled her mom, Velvet Harten. “She had a checkup in the summer and everything was fine. A few months later, she wasn’t feeling well, so we took her to the doctor and discovered that she was loaded with sugar. It was a total shock.
“She received regular insulin injections for the first few years, but her sugar levels were all over the map. The pediatrician said she was a good candidate for an insulin pump, but we didn’t have a program here (in Sault Ste. Marie) at the time.”
Kelseigh was referred to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, 800 kilometres down Highway 17, initiating what has become a nine-year ordeal of three round trips a year between Sault Ste. Marie and Ottawa.
Travelling by car would have taken close to 12 hours each way. Kelseigh would have had to take time off from school and her mom would have had to take time off from work. Dicey winter road conditions were a further incentive for considering the only other alternative, air travel, but two return tickets, three times a year would have cost the Harten family thousands of dollars that they didn’t have.
Hope Air, a charity founded 25 years ago to help financially disadvantaged Canadians travel to larger urban centres for medical care, came to the rescue.
“I found out about Hope Air through a lady who used to babysit for me,” said Velvet. “I ran into her one day and she told me she had used Hope Air for her daughter and that I should look into it.”
The process is simple and straightforward. Harten calls the Hope Air toll-free call centre in Toronto, provides the date and time of the appointment and receives a callback with the flight details and a reference number for staff at the Bearskin counter.
“We ask for gross household income,” said Hope Air flight manager Sandrine Levrier. “We also take into account if they have medical expenses related to their condition and if they are covered by a health plan.
“We don’t ask for proof. We just take their word for it. We’ve steered away from asking for tax returns and all that. Most people are pretty straightforward about it.”
Hope Air calls the referring physician to confirm that the patient is medically fit to travel and calls the physician at the other end to confirm that the patient has an appointment. If everything checks out, Hope Air staff contact a partner airline to make the bookings.
“For the most part, we are able to accommodate patients, although some routes are more challenging than others,” said Levrier.
If commercial airlines are booked up, Hope Air can call upon private aircraft owners through its Volunteer Pilot Program to provide transportation. The charity has approximately 100 active volunteer pilots and a core group of 35 or 40 across the country, said Levrier.
Volunteer pilot flights from Sault Ste. Marie to Toronto, a route that’s particularly challenging to book, are able to land at the Toronto Island Airport, a short distance from the city’s major hospitals.
Adult caregivers are always accommodated if the patient is a child or if the patient’s physician indicates that an escort is required for medical reasons.
Hope Air reimburses pilots for 50 per cent of their fuel and other operating costs and provides a charitable tax receipt for the balance.
The charity was established 25 years ago by Joan Rogers and Jinnie Bradshaw, two Toronto nurses “who saw the impact of a 12 or 13-hour bus ride on cancer patients coming down to Toronto from Northern Ontario for chemotherapy treatments,” said Levrier. In 1986, its first year of operation, the Mission Air Transportation Network, as it was then known, arranged a total of 56 flights.
In 1991, Canadian Airlines encouraged its customers to donate their travel points to Mission Air, and over the next 10 years, hundreds of thousands of Canadian Airlines travel points were donated to the charity. By 1993, the organization had flown its 10,000th flight, and in this its 25th year, is celebrating 66,000 flights.
Ron Hell, Bearskin Airlines’ director of marketing and sales, estimates the Northern Ontario-based airline supplied approximately 200 flights in 2010, the majority of them from Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Kapuskasing and Timmins.
“We think of ourselves as a hometown airline in the markets we serve and care about our customers by supporting the communities that support us,” said Hell. “There are people in need of health care who don’t have the financial means to travel to distant urban centres. It’s something that tugs at the heartstrings.”
“Hope Air and Bearskin are awesome,” said Harten. “Without them, we’d be lost.”
Requests for air travel through Hope Air can also be made on the charity’s website: www.hopeair.org
