Send McGarry to Mongolia (March 4)

Ideas to take back our own health care system

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Ever since the government announced a few weeks ago that it intended to close six rural NB Emergency Rooms, we have learned quite a lot, among them that John McGarry, who as CEO of Horizon Health, tried for years to get Perth’s hospital closed, was certainly influential in that recent proposal.

            I thought we had seen the last of that guy when he retired as CEO in January 2017, but like a virus (or Vladimar Putin), he’s back under another position, appointed in January of this year as Chairman of the Board of Horizon Health.

            What a coincidence that a couple of weeks after this accountant (no medical training) was appointed board chair that Horizon Health and the NB government came up with this plan – attempted in 2014 but thwarted by public and other outcries – to close rural emergency rooms. (Another coincidence: five of those six emergency rooms were in Liberal ridings, with the sixth in a very safe Tory seat.)

            So now it’s up to us to suggest ways to retain our health care system. My first suggestion would be to get rid of John McGarry – send him on a fact-finding mission to Outer Mongolia – and about six layers of vice-presidents and other deadwood bureaucrats in Horizon Health and Vitalité Health Network NB. Every few months that crowd announces that New Brunswick’s health system is “unsustainable”, so watch out for that. It is a code word for “Let’s close down as many rural hospitals as we can, while we can”.

            I have talked to several (many) people about Premier Higgs’s about-face (now identified as a pause) on the latest attempt to gut rural hospitals and they seem oddly complacent. Big mistake. While we are whistling in the dark, those bureaucrats in Fredericton are working on other ways to reduce rural health care. Count on it. We are the mice and they are the cats, quietly awaiting their chance.

            After the premier postponed making these significant changes, Perth-Andover Mayor Marianne Bell hosted a rally near the front door of Hotel Dieu Hospital. The people who attended that – well over 200 – were not complacent; they knew those Fredericton based folks were not going to give up.

            “Make no mistake, closing ERs at night will compromise health outcomes,” ER doctor Josh O’Hagan told the crowd. “The numbers may not be huge, but a rural life is as important as an urban life.” Now there’s a statement that should be put up on the walls of all Horizon Health and government employees, deadwood included. He went on to say that driving to Waterville or Edmundston to visit family members would affect the patient’s recovery time.

            “Horizon Health needs to focus its efforts on these matters, not closing services due to a perceived staffing crisis they helped create by constantly threatening closures for essential services.”

            So let’s get to work and come up with ideas that will help us rural citizens maintain the good level of health care we enjoy. Horizon Health and the government keep insisting it’s not money-saving that is driving these “reforms”, but a genuine desire to improve health care. And my Aunt Fanny is a rocket scientist.

They say they can’t get the staff. Well, here are a couple of ways to increase the number of staffers:

Increase the number of nurses’ spots open at universities and when they graduate, actually hire them instead of acting like bean-counters and hiring them only part-time because that looks good on a balance sheet. Of course what happens is that the young, trained nurses can’t make a living here and head for Ontario, Maine or some other full-time job site.

We often hear on news reports about a fully qualified physician, a refugee from Syria or some other war-torn area of the world, who has been deluged with red tape for two or three years while trying to get accredited in Canada. Of course they have to be trained for Canada, but this is not a medical bottleneck; it’s our old friend Bureaucracy.

Surely our overworked doctors would be happy if some of their work could be done by another level of medical staff. It doesn’t require an MD to renew most prescriptions, and in fact this province and other provinces have now allowed pharmacists to do that very thing once only done by doctors.

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I should mention at this point that in my column two weeks ago I blamed Horizon Health (and do they ever deserve it!) and the Tories for the effort to damage rural health care while lying about improving it, but the Liberals deserve their fair share of blame.

Frank McKenna and his governments went on a frenzy of centralization in the 1990s, and among the victims were rural hospitals. Plaster Rock and Perth-Andover hospitals lost their local hospital boards and therefore local control over health. Heaven forfend that rural people should decide what company should choose the supper menu for patients!

There have been other baffling decisions made by the Liberals over the years and there’s another one being done right now. The NB Liberal leader, Kevin Vickers, seems  to be totally focussed on bringing down the Tory government rather than helping to improve our health care system – you know, the one that should treat us all equally, Liberal or Tory.

Let’s start writing letters of suggestions to the editors of Fredericton newspapers  and to Horizon Health (Horizon@HorizonNB.ca 506-623-5500). Surely in this province of bright people we can come up with some good ideas.
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Gutting rural health care (Feb. 19)

Let’s redefine 'emergency'

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I know it was an unfair – though accurate – thing to say, but on the evening of the last provincial election in which the Tories won a minority government I said to my wife: “There goes Perth hospital”.

            And so it may come to pass. Tory governments and Horizon Health have been wanting to close Hotel Dieu for many many years. Are they going to succeed this time?

            First of all, their idea that medical emergencies only occur in the daytime is a logical way of looking at the whole thing I suppose, if you live in the shadow of a city hospital, but common sense (I do not refer to government) says that quite a few people go out on these things called snowmobiles which tend to become embedded in fir trees at 4:00 am. It is rarely a fair fight.

            Horizon Health managed quite a few years ago to close Perth hospital’s two state-of-the-art operating rooms and quickly whisked all their high-tech equipment down south where another Tory government had built a large hospital out in a potato field. At that point Bath Hospital bit the dust but Perth-Andover voices were quickly raised in support of our hospital.

            How I remember the Horizon Health executive who, after the 2012 flood, gleefully reported that Perth hospital would never recover from the devastation and would almost certainly be closed now. “It’s only a 40-minute drive to Waterville hospital” she said, thereby breaking Commandment #11B: “Thou shalt not lie like a cheap rug when people’s lives are at stake”.

            But it wasn’t yet the time for the greatly exaggerated demise. Hotel Dieu would be back. Horizon Health was frustrated once again. If they had had their way the ER would be gone forever, replaced, perhaps, by a custodian standing by the front door and handing out Band-Aids to repair broken legs and knife wounds such as those suffered by the bus driver who is alive today because Perth ER was only four minutes away.

            We all know someone who would be pushing up daisies if not for that ER. Someone very near and dear to my own heart had to be taken from this house at 1:00 am on Dec. 23. He had suffered a broken back and I doubt if he preferred to ride to Waterville (45-55 minutes from here) instead of Perth (15-20 minutes).

            The government’s first phase would have seen Perth ER and five more around the province close from midnight to 8:00 am, but that was just to soften us up for the next phases. ERs would, soon after, close for the night at 10:00 pm. Meanwhile the ambulance system can hardly deal with the way things are now.

            We know the reason for much of this, don’t we? It’s yet another hit on rural New Brunswick. Government and other bureaucrats sit around big curved tables and ponder how they can sock it to us yet again. This particular ‘reform’ must have taken them several minutes, because we know that Horizon Health had the plans all made months – perhaps years ago. Every year as flood season approaches they are saying: “Now? Now?” But with this government plan they won’t have to ask that question, or so they think.

            And what about the premier’s role in this? He sounds eager to call an election on the issue, but in the end sounds like Donald Trump bragging that he’s done nothing wrong. And speaking of Donald Trump (the only president who could possible have made George W. Bush look good), this whole ‘reform’ plan (they always call it ‘reform’ rather than what it is), looks like something he would do. Make it sound innocuous at first, then pile on the bad news.

            “An old-fashioned winter” with lots of snow is what we’re having at the moment, and it seems like a good time for an old-fashioned brawl. It’s time this government learned that people who live in rural areas deserve health care too. It is true that our province’s health care system does need a good close look, but they are looking at the wrong send of the boa constrictor.

            I would recommend the first step be to execute all the Horizon Health upper crust as well as those civil servants who seem to have their brains scrambled when they talk about health care. Wait! I didn’t mean stand them up against a wall and blast them because, as Nixon said he said: “That would be wrong.” (He didn’t actually say that.)

            Talking recently to a friend who spent two weeks in Edmundston hospital (not one to be cut), I was interested to hear that during his fortnight stay there, he hardly encountered a person who spoke English to him. Rather than taking this opportunity to rail against the other –lingual of bilingual, he said he had received excellent care and the staff had been second to none. Perhaps those who froth and drool and want every ambulance worker to be Jean-Paul Sartre or Alice Munroe in their use of both languages should consider this.

            NOTE: As of Sunday evening, I have heard that the government has cancelled the health care ‘reforms’. Did the government fall, or did their faces fall when they saw the public reaction? Now how about if we and they all get to work and come up with ideas to actually reform the health care system instead of hammering the rural hospitals?
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