Hours — and days — to be saved with ferry medical transportation
A new law that allows medical samples from island health clinics to be transported aboard Maine State Ferries goes into effect on Friday. It’s expected to save islanders hours and even days, as they will no longer be burdened with transporting the samples themselves to mainland medical facilities and back again.
Previous changes to ferry service rules had the unintended consequence of forcing island residents to take hours or even days out of their lives to travel with medical samples to mainland medical facilities and back again. The new law solves the problem by requiring the installation of lockboxes on state ferries.
Once installed, islanders will be able to deposit medical samples in the lockboxes, and medical professionals on the mainland will be allowed access to the lockbox and its contents, facilitating diagnostic testing and other important health care services without time-consuming waits and ferry travel for island residents.
“My constituents and other island residents all along our coastline have been needlessly inconvenienced by state ferry rules that required them to take hours or even days out of their lives for routine health care services,” state Sen. Dave Miramant, who sponsored the law, said in a release. “That was time they could have been working or spending with their families. This law is a commonsense solution to the problem.”
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