New Fort William First Nation Medical First Response Team to improve emergency response times

By Rick Garrick

FORT WILLIAM — The Fort William First Nation Medical First Response Team recently shared information about their goals to save and empower lives during two virtual information sessions on May 26 and 27.

“We’ll be doing more in the next couple of weeks,” says Mason Morriseau, Medical First Response Team chief and Fort William citizen. “They’re basically about just to invite anybody from the community or anybody from the city that has questions about the team. And we also opened up the floor for individuals that had questions, comments and concerns about how the team will run and what we do.”

Morriseau says the Medical First Response Team will be paged along with the Superior EMS (Emergency Medical Services) whenever a 911 call comes in within the area of Fort William First Nation.

“Everybody on the team is trained to their first response level,” Morriseau says. ”With us being so close in the community, we can arrive on scene exponentially quicker than an ambulance and provide some of the important and critical measures that we have to do, whether it be starting CPR or stopping a bleed before EMS can get there.”

Morriseau says the proposal for the Medical First Response Team was approved by Fort William Council in late February.

“The team will be generally comprised of volunteers — the hope is that in the future once we secure the team we might be looking towards making the team a paid service,” Morriseau says. “Currently, we are not responding to calls. It should be fairly soon that we get the approval for funding … and once that’s done we’ll be in the community responding to calls.”

Morriseau says the Medical First Response Team has also been recruiting individuals from the community.

“A lot of the individuals who have shown interest in joining so far either have a background in being on a first response team or they don’t have any background and they just want to try something new,” Morriseau says. “We’ve had some people that have come on and said: ‘I really want to help my community out and to be that support to provide medical care to people that need it.’”

Morriseau says he has experience as a volunteer with St. John Ambulance in Thunder Bay.

“I saw a need for [Fort William] to start a first response team and I took the challenge and spearheaded the operation of starting it,” Morriseau says.

Fort William Chief Peter Collins says the Medical First Response Team will cut down on the response time for emergency medical services, noting that Fort William Council “support it 100 per cent because it is really critical” for the community.

“With the emergency response vehicles not being able to cross the bridge yet because of the narrowness of that bridge, it takes a few extra minutes to get around,” Chief Collins says. “So I think that is the importance of getting the [Medical First Response Team] up and running so that we can get quicker response times.”

Chief Collins says Fort William is currently looking for an ambulance for the Medical First Response Team.

“Hopefully he can get the response time shortened by four or five or six minutes, which could be important to somebody’s life,” he says.

Fort William previously established the Fort William First Nation Fire Department with William Solomon as the community fire officer. The Fire Department received a used pumper truck, a water tanker and 25 complete sets of firefighters gear in 2020 through Firefighters Without Borders.

Information about the Medical First Response Team is posted online at: fwfnfirstresponse.com