Yellowknife family leaves NWT over medical travel frustration

A mother says she and her family have packed up and left the NWT following a lack of support for her daughter, who survived a rare eye cancer, to maintain medical care with a specialist in Ontario.

“I tried really hard to make things change and I tried really hard to advocate for my child, but there needs to be a point where something’s got to change,” Chloee Baillargeon Parent told Cabin Radio.

She said there is too much red tape around accessing medical travel in the territory and policies need to be reviewed, particularly the application of an exemption policy.

Baillargeon Parent said her daughter was diagnosed with retinoblastoma when she was three years old and urgently sent from Yellowknife to Edmonton for treatment in 2021. After arriving at the Stollery Children’s Hospital, she said she was told her daughter’s case was too far along and complex and she needed to go to SickKids in Toronto.

At SickKids, Baillargeon Parent said she learned that her daughter would need to have one of her eyes removed, and she underwent two surgeries to do so.

While speaking to doctors about survival percentages, Baillargeon Parent said she received “nonstop” phone calls from medical travel about needing a doctor’s note or her hotel room would be cancelled.

While Baillargeon Parent said she understands the need for documentation, she said updated documents in her daughter’s electronic medical records would have indicated she had been receiving care at SickKids. She said medical travel should be more compassionate toward people facing challenging situations.

“Honestly, I should have had a secretary,” she said regarding the paperwork required.

“Can you make it just a little bit easier on the people that are suffering, instead of making it worse for them?”

Medical travel policies

Baillargeon Parent said retinoblastoma survivors need long-term monitoring and her daughter requires regular fittings every six months for her prosthetic eye.

She said she returned to Toronto with her daughter for medical care on two other occasions, but she was subsequently told medical travel would not support further visits to Ontario as her daughter could receive care in Alberta.

The NWT’s medical travel policy states benefits are normally granted for the “nearest approved facility that is available to provide the necessary and appropriate insured health service required for the patient.”

Residents can file appeals, which are reviewed by the NWT’s director of medical insurance.

The territory also has a ministerial policy on medical travel exemptions, which states the health department will “use a patient-centred approach to consider exceptional circumstances not otherwise addressed” in medical travel policies.

For an exception to be considered, the policy states a person must be eligible for medical travel benefits and “faced with extraordinary health needs and/or can demonstrate undue financial hardship as a result of individual or unique circumstances.”

In a letter to the health minister’s office, shared with Cabin Radio, Baillargeon Parent requested an exemption for her daughter to continue seeing a specialist at SickKids.

She argued her daughter’s case met the criteria due to the rarity of retinoblastoma, the specialized and complex nature of ocular prosthetic management, and the importance of maintaining a trusted relationship with a specialist for her daughter’s long-term physical and mental health.

She said not all ophthalmology departments or ocularists have the training and experience to manage the long-term monitoring of ocular implants for retinoblastoma survivors.

Baillargeon Parent said her request was supported by letters from specialists, Yellowknife physicians and the head of SickKids’ retinoblastoma program, but it was denied and the health minister declined to meet with her.

‘My daughter deserves continuity of care’

Baillargeon Parent told Cabin Radio that switching chemotherapy teams from Toronto to Edmonton had caused her daughter distress, on top of the trauma of having an eye removed.

She said her daughter is now eight years old and continues to experience anxiety and phobias.

“She can’t go down the hall by herself, she can’t sleep by herself, she’s always scared if anything’s going to happen,” she said, adding the NWT lacks appropriate mental health supports. “The anxiety is on another level.”

Baillargeon Parent said she wants to save her daughter the further stress of having to start over with a new doctor in Alberta.

“My daughter deserves continuity of care,” she said. “She deserves to have one thing that she’s not going to have anxiety about.”

Baillargeon Parent said a further, separate medical travel issue that involved challenges getting her partner approved to travel as her escort to Edmonton where she had to make a challenging decision during a high-risk pregnancy, became “the nail in the coffin.”

“We came back and I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m done. It’s been years of fighting for my child,'” she said.

Baillargeon Parent and her family recently moved to Alberta. She said while she is not sure the province will cover medical travel to SickKids, flights to Toronto are cheaper from Edmonton than Yellowknife.

‘Brick walls’

Range Lake MLA Kieron Testart has been advocating for Baillargeon Parent and her daughter with the NWT government.

He described facing “brick walls” and questioned the point of a medical travel exemption policy if it is not used in the case of “a little girl who’s screaming and running away from medical procedures and had to have an eye removed.”

“This should have been dealt with compassionately. It should have been dealt with according to the best medical advice, not policies that, quite frankly, could be changed in the stroke of a pen. And it shouldn’t take multiple ministers and MLAs to make those changes,” he said.

Testart, who has previously expressed his lack of confidence in health minister Lesa Semmler, said he’s disappointed Semmler declined to meet with Baillargeon Parent.

“We need things to change before this happens to more people and before we lose more hardworking northern families,” he said, “who are doing their best to make ends meet in a very expensive place where there aren’t the support services they need.”

Minister won’t interfere in decisions

In response to earlier questions from Testart, Semmler told the legislature in February that while she has the authority to approve medical travel exceptions, those decisions are based on recommendations from a medical advisor.

She said the majority of exception requests she receives are related to air ambulances, which are not covered by medical travel nor escort policies.

“My role is to ensure when these concerns are coming up that I am able to bring forward – through our processes, through our business planning process – the evidence and the data … and when asking this House to spend public dollars,” she said, adding the system gets residents to “wherever the nearest service place is.”

In an interview with Cabin Radio, Semmler said she could not discuss specific cases but, in general, for medical travel outside the territory, the NWT uses established “referral pathways” with Alberta.

“We have to ensure it’s sustainable and we are ensuring people can access that,” she said.

Asked whether continuity of care is considered, Semmler said maintaining the territory’s established relationship with Alberta is continuity of care. She added the NWT government does not stop people travelling elsewhere for medical care but will not pay for that.

“If you look at Yellowknife, there’s a lot of people here that are not from the territories, and if we were paying for people to fly back wherever they came from … it would cost us a lot of money,” she said.

“I understand that when a patient does want to have that connection, it’s hard to hear that … public funds are not going to be able to be used.”

Semmler said a medical advisor is contracted to review requests for exemptions.

“I don’t overrule medical decisions,” she said. “I stay out of that as a minister and I leave that in operations, and leave that to the health professionals that make those decisions.”

While she has a background as a registered nurse in Inuvik, Semmler said not every person who will sit in the health minister’s chair will have the same knowledge or “be able to navigate those high-level decisions.”

According to a GNWT report, medical travel cases and costs have increased in recent years, including for cases involving out-of-territory travel and escorts.

Scheduled and emergency medical travel cases increased from 17,478 in 2022-23 to 23,004 in 2024-25. Costs increased from more than $56 million to more than $80 million during that period, although increases in cost recovery from third parties meant net spending decreased from more than $28 million to under $16 million.

The territory’s health authority audited a sample of 280 medical travel files from 2025 and found that, of 30 appeals submitted, seven denials were overturned. In some cases, the authority said, coverage was originally denied because referrals were submitted late.

The audit found evidence of human error in 0.4 percent of all cases.

Modernization efforts

Semmler said she has heard residents’ concerns with the medical travel system “loud and clear” and pointed to ongoing work to modernize the medical travel process.

That includes work to update both the territory’s medical travel policy and a federal agreement for administering non-insured health benefits, as well as review medical travel benefits, exceptions and appeals.

Semmler highlighted that, beginning in September, residents with a valid NWT healthcare card that lack medical travel coverage will be covered under the Extended Health Benefits program rather than the medical travel policy. Those affected need to apply for Extended Health Benefits to access coverage.

In April, the NWT health authority announced a two-year pilot program in Yellowknife that uses case managers to help coordinate medical travel with the aim of reducing avoidable costs and improving patient experience.

The minister said there is a lack of understanding about medical travel policies, even among some healthcare providers. She said she has directed the territorial health authority to improve communication with employees, including locum staff.

Another challenge, Semmler said, is that health centres have often sent medical travel requests in batches, meaning a referral made months in advance may not make it to medical travel staff until shortly before travel needs to be booked.

She said she has asked the health authority to ensure medical travel referrals are sent as soon as possible.