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.-end-
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