CHARLOS COVE — Alone, cold and increasingly anxious, 70-year-old Thomas Downey sat outside his dentist’s office in Antigonish for three hours earlier this month, waiting for a medical transport van that never came.
Downey, a wheelchair user who lives in the tiny coastal village of Charlos Cove, had travelled to Antigonish for appointments using Emergency Health Services (EHS) Medical Transport Service – a non-emergency program introduced to help rural seniors and individuals with mobility challenges get to medical appointments. But, when it came time to go home, no one showed.
“I was freezing,” said Downey in an interview. “It was serious.”
Downey said his trip had been carefully planned. Earlier that day, an EHS driver dropped him off at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital for an appointment with a specialist. From there, he made his way to his dentist’s office in his power wheelchair, where he was scheduled to be picked up around 5:15 p.m.
But, as the sun sank below the horizon on a chilly early March evening, no van arrived. “They left me outside for three hours,” he said. “I’m 70 years old ... I thought, ‘I can’t handle this anymore.’”
He finally called 911 – at the same time as the EHS crew arrived. “They were concerned about hypothermia,” said Downey. “They got some warm blankets out of the ambulance.”
The ordeal didn’t end there, however. He said he developed a bad cold afterwards and is still recovering. “My immune system’s not that great.”
Downey said this wasn’t the first time he was let down by the EHS service. “They did this to me twice before. Once they didn’t even pick me up to go to Truro for a specialist appointment. Another time, I was supposed to go to Antigonish, and they just never came. The only reason I used the service again this time is because my wheelchair van was in the shop.”
Downey, who worked for 27 years as a barber in Halifax before retiring to Charlos Cove, now lives with a caregiver in the tight-knit community of about 25 people. He has limited mobility and no family nearby, and suffers from ongoing health conditions since suffering a heart attack five years ago.
“My chest started getting really tight,” he said about that early March night. “I think I was probably having an anxiety attack – because I already had a heart attack.”
His situation underscores growing concerns in rural Nova Scotia, where an aging population is placing increased strain on public health services. According to the latest data from Statistics Canada, nearly 30 per cent of residents in Guysborough County are over the age of 65 – the highest proportion in mainland Nova Scotia.
Recognizing this demographic shift, Nova Scotia Health and Emergency Health Services introduced a redesigned EHS Medical Transport Service in 2023 to better serve non-emergency patients needing assistance with scheduled medical appointments, particularly in rural areas. The program is intended to provide safe, reliable transport for seniors and others with limited mobility who may not otherwise have access to care.
But Downey’s experience raises questions about how well the system is working.
“It was so mixed up with the dispatchers that I was talking with – whoever did the scheduling,” he said. “If you don’t know how to run a program properly, you shouldn’t be running it. That’s especially true [when dealing with] seniors with disabilities.”
In a written statement to The Journal, Gordon Peckham, vice president of operations at EHS, confirmed the agency is aware of the incident.
“Although we cannot comment on specific patient cases due to confidentiality, we have spoken to the patient and taken this matter seriously,” he wrote. “Our top priority is always the safety and well-being of our patients. We have reviewed the surrounding circumstances to better understand what transpired and, where necessary, have taken appropriate steps to improve the patient experience in the future.”
Peckham added that the transport service has recently been redesigned “to better meet the needs of our patients and clients, and we will continue to refine this service as it evolves.”
Downey, however, said he’s heard it all before. “[Peckham] called me and said, ‘I wish you’d spoken to me before you went to the papers.’ I told him, ‘I worked all my life. I’m certainly not going to show a company how to do dispatching. That’s not my job.’”
For him, the stakes are personal – and urgent. In a province where access to health care is already a challenge for many rural residents, he said his story is a cautionary tale. He worries about others who may not have the means or voice to advocate for themselves.
“This should have never happened to me,” he said. “It could have ended very badly ... and I don’t want it to happen to anybody else, especially not someone with a disability or an elderly person.”
