Even the Ombudsman say the problem:
http://www.ombudsman.forces.gc.ca/rep-rap/sr-rs/rc-str/rep-rap-04-eng.asp#pha-esp
Periodic Health Assessments
In the military, a periodic health assessment is also called a “medical.” A medical is considered current if it has been done within the last five years for members under 40 years of age, within the last two years for members aged 40 to 50, and within the last year for those members older than 50.
The Canadian Forces provides medicals to these standards for Regular Force members. By contrast, Reservists are only given medicals for enrolment, release, promotion, and prior to proceeding on Class B service of more than 180 days or Class C service. Reservists who have not recently been promoted or deployed may go years without having a medical assessment by the Canadian Forces. Therefore, a significant number of Reservists do not have current Canadian Forces medicals on file.
This difference can have a negative impact on Reserve personnel who are needed for domestic immediate operations, which are short notice operations requiring the immediate mobilization of members. In these cases, there is insufficient time to conduct a formal screening process. Chief of Military Personnel Instruction 20/04 states that for domestic immediate operations, the Commanding Officer must certify that the member has a current medical on file. Those without must undergo a medical assessment and be found fit or be excluded from the deployment.
A number of Reservists on Class A and Class B service of 180 days or less do not have current medicals on their file because there is no defined policy stating that they are required, nor are they eligible to receive periodic health assessments from the Canadian Forces. Although the present policy does not require periodic health assessments to be current, Reservists are expected to be fit, employable and deployable for general operational duties.
The absence of an up-to-date periodic health assessment record for Reservists limits the Canadian Forces’ capability to efficiently screen for domestic operations in a timely manner. We were told that Canadian Forces Health Services does not have sufficient personnel to medically assess Reservists en masse and on short notice for domestic operations.
A senior medical authority advised our investigators that when the Canadian Forces mobilized Reservists in 2003 to fight forest fires in British Columbia,17 there were risks taken:
…the blip is manageable and predictable when it comes to the numbers that we look forward [sic] to go on a rotation to Afghanistan, for example. The numbers were not manageable when we mobilized basically everybody to fight the BC forest fires. We ended up doing some pretty slipshod, shortcut kinds of things to get everybody documented and put on Class C. I wasn’t very happy about it, but…
Others confirmed this view. Our investigators were told that the Canadian Forces do not have the capacity to do complete medical assessments on short notice for a substantial number of Reservists (as would be required for emergency domestic operations), and that the only way to do this many short notice assessments would be to reduce the quality.
The consequences that result from this situation are:
Members are sent on missions without sufficient screening, leading to the inclusion of unhealthy members on operations and the associated risks to their well-being and that of others;
Members are not sent on operations because they cannot be screened for medical fitness, leading to the exclusion of healthy, medically-fit and capable Reservists; and
Medical practitioners are placed in an ethical dilemma as a result of having to balance the need of the individual Reservist for a thorough screening against the needs of the public in having a robust response to the domestic emergency.
The lessons learned report from Operation Peregrine included a comment that “the procedure to put Reservists on Class C service is cumbersome and NDHQ-centered, creating an administrative burden and putting at risk a timely response to the operational requirements.” The proposed solution to the cumbersome process was to waive the need for a current medical status for Reservists.
Our Office takes vigorous exception to the solution proposed, since it breaches a fundamental principle of fairness. In this case, the Canadian Forces duty of care is essentially the same for Reserve Force personnel as it is for Regular Force personnel. If a qualified authority deems that a current medical assessment is necessary for determining the medical fitness status of a Regular Force member for the purpose of deployment on operations, then the same standard must be applied to a Reservist. If this requirement can be waived for a Reservist, then one must question the value and validity of the requirement in the first place.
This matter is not lost on some Reserve commanders who have taken initiatives on their own. A staff officer in personnel at a Reserve brigade headquarters told investigators:
Our Commander has been pushing this the last couple of years. He’s directed to each one of the COs [Commanding Officers] that everyone is to have a periodical medical. That is something that we are taking on our own because we are not built for that in the system. So therefore it comes out of the hide of the unit budget to make it happen.
The issue of appropriate standards for periodic health assessments was also discussed at the June 2007 meeting of the Strategic Military Human Resources Council. At that meeting, Council endorsed the adoption of a standard for periodic health assessments for implementation in Fall 2008 or January 2009. This standard called for assessments every two years for both the Regular Force and the Primary Reserve.
We note with approval that this approach applies equally to both Regular and Reserve Force personnel. However it is not yet implemented, and in the interim, it is unfair that most Reservists do not enjoy the same protection gained from periodic health assessments as their full time counterparts. Sick, injured or medically unfit Reservists need to be identified through periodic health assessments in order to prevent further injury to themselves, or increased risk to other members of their unit. Therefore,
We recommend that, within 12 months following the publication of this report, the standards for periodic health assessments be applied equally for Primary Reserve and Regular Force personnel.
for those interested:
Reserved Care: An Investigation into the Treatment of Injured Reservists
http://www.ombudsman.forces.gc.ca/rep-rap/sr-rs/rc-str/index-eng.asp
My contacts are split on this with no one able to provide a clear policy, only pers opinion or the unwritten policy they have followed (the Med A said yes, reg and res the same). Still waiting for some responses and still looking but to be honest I think this most likely is still the same - no official policy saying yes they are to be done with local policy dictating what is actually done.
