Yes. Almost across the country you can find a pocket of something where you go, “Wow, that's great”. I'm from the east coast, so I'll bring this one up. It's quite new. We did a project in partnership with Prince Edward Island where we did training with our paramedics. You may have heard of it. It started off with paramedics actually extending and doing a little bit more work in long-term care facilities. They have their advanced paramedics able to go to a long-term care facility and do a little bit more of an assessment, call back to a physician, and ideally keep that person in the long-term care facility.
Discussions started on whether or not we could do this for other special patient populations. We talked about palliative care. We thought that sounded like a great idea. As you start to look at that 24-hour coverage, how do you get access in the middle of the night, weekends, and so on? They said it was a great project, and we received some funding through the Canadian foundation for innovative health.
They started saying that we needed to do education, so I introduced that project to Pallium, who within a couple of months had developed LEAP Paramedic, which formed the standard training. Over about a month, we provided training to every EHS professional in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and got the project up and running. Now there's a special patient population that we as a palliative care team or even a primary care physician can register the patient for. It provides more information to EHS so that they will know what potentially they will be responding to.
Within that, there are more goals of care for the person so that they will know, yes, they will respond here, but the person does not want to go to the hospital. They will know when they respond that they may need to help address some acute shortness of breath, or acute nausea and vomiting, or something like that, as opposed to needing to pick up the person and take them to hospital.
It has gone over tremendously. I still have on my to-do list a note that I have to write. Yesterday I had a case where one of our patients had developed nausea and vomiting through the night. She was quite dehydrated, quite elderly, and was probably heading toward going to the emergency department. Our EHS colleagues arrived, and the comment I heard from the daughter was that she so much appreciated that they stopped and said, ”Okay, let's look at what's going on here” as opposed to saying, “She has this symptom and that symptom. Let's get her to emergency.”
They asked what her goals were, and found out that ideally she didn't want to go to hospital. They were calm. They discussed it. They gave me a call. We did some interventions. They gave her some fluid at home and gave her some anti-nausea medication. I was able to drop in a little bit later on, and she was doing much better. So there was a patient who avoided an emergency room visit. She was happier. Her husband was happier. Her daughter was happier. They complimented the EHS team. It's on my to-do list that I need to send an email back through our folks to give a pat on the back to those EHS providers. It's always nice to hear that your work is appreciated.
That's one project, but there are many right across the country. Alberta is doing the same project, and now LEAP Paramedic has incorporated some of the Alberta things. It's been adapted a little bit. There are now really three provinces that this has had uptake in, and it's starting to spread across the country. There are lots of great examples of that. Ten years ago we wouldn't have thought of using EHS as a partner in this, but again, at two o'clock in the morning they can go and they have had some extra education. In Nova Scotia they have some different tools and medications on their buses that they didn't have previously, so now they are able to help make more things happen.