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Home blood tests needed
Letter to the Editor
An open letter to MLA Jennifer Rice, Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Health.
Doctors all across B.C. should be able to order blood samples for medical tests to be taken from patients at their homes.
Such a service would eliminate the need for frail and barely mobile seniors and their elderly spouses/caregivers to struggle to get to a testing lab numerous times a year, especially in the winter. Since testing is free at a lab, so should it be free at a patient’s home.
LifeLabs does not charge for a home visit when requested by a physician, but only in some parts of the province. Here in the East Kootenay, it costs $75 for a nurse to come to a residence and take a blood sample. That’s too expensive for most seniors, and the lack of this service represents a significant hole in our home care program.
Prior to the Covid pandemic, I sent this proposal to a number of MLAs, most of whom forwarded it to the Health Ministry. From the ministry I received a long bureaucratic message claiming that there was nothing they could do because testing was controlled by the health authorities.
Perhaps if the health authorities got rid of some of their 64 vice presidents—earning around $400,000 each—they could afford to extend this important home testing service throughout B.C.
I hope the political masters will make that happen.
Jean Samis,
Kimberley