Kawartha Lakes health unit committed to learning from wildfire smoke event

DAN CEARNS, The Standard

KAWARTHA LAKES: The Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit (HKPR) is treating the recent wildfire smoke and air quality risk moment as a learning opportunity.

Earlier this month, the health unit announced the Air Quality Health Index was moved to ‘High Risk’ in Kawartha Lakes, Northumberland County and Haliburton County, following wildfire activity across Canada.

At a board of health meeting, on Thursday, June 15th, local medical officer of health, Dr. Natalie Bocking spoke about this occurrence and how the health unit can learn from it.

“This is actually the first air quality event of this magnitude [which] has impacted across all of HKPR at the same time as most of South Eastern Ontario. So, it was a good opportunity for us to look at the role of public health, in this event, and the work the health unit needed to do in sharing out information, related to the risk of air quality the community was facing,” she stated.

Dr. Bocking noted, health units aren’t the lead agency when an event like this happens. Instead, Environment Canada and the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks take the lead in communicating information on this, with the health unit in a more supporting role.

“We are reviewing and debriefing after this incident. Looking at what went well, [and] where we have room to improve. As always, there’s opportunities to improve; and especially looking at how we work with municipalities on these events, to get communications out,” Dr. Bocking explained.

Currently, the Air Quality Health Index is set at Low Risk in Kawartha Lakes.