Doctors and nurses keep saying that the health care system is “in crisis.
Corinne McQuillan has had to deal with three different health care problems in P.E.I. recently.
After waiting for years, she just lost a surgery appointment because her doctor is leaving the province.
She had to wait a long time with her baby daughter in the emergency room of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Now, McQuillan’s family is losing its family doctor because he or she is retiring.
She said that she no longer has faith in the health care system in P.E.I.
“If you want to know the truth, it’s a mess,” McQuillan said.
“I’m just worried about my kids…. I have a child who needs extra help. I need to know that a doctor will be there if I need to take her to the doctor.”
“We’re just about out of space here.
The P.E.I. Medical Society is asking candidates for provincial office to promise to take “urgent action” to save a system that is about to fall apart.
The society’s president, Dr. Krista Cassell, said that years of pressure from pandemics and a lack of staff have led to a health care system that isn’t working well “in trouble… and we’re just about out of time here. People are tired and angry at the same time. In this system, it’s hard to do your job every day.”
Politicians from all parties have made it clear that health care is the most important issue in the campaign. In response, they have made pages of promises to get P.E.I’s health care system off of life support and back on its feet.
Here are some of the things they have promised to do.
A doctor’s office for each Islande
When the Dennis King Progressive Conservatives took power in the spring of 2019, there were about 13,000 Islanders on the province’s patient registry waiting for a family doctor.
Today, there are more than twice as many, more than 28,500, which is one out of every six people who live on the Island.
At one of the first stops of the 2023 campaign, King talked about the “doctor for every Islander” promise that helped elect a Liberal government led by Robert Ghiz in 2007.
King said that the Liberals never got there and that no government on the Island ever will.
But he promised that in the next two years, every Islander would be taken off the patient registry by opening more collaborative medical practices, which the Tories call medical homes and neighbourhoods.
King said that his goal for the patient registry was to have nothing in it in 24 months. “We want to take everyone off the registry and link them to a medical home or neighborhood because I think what Islanders want is access to services. And that is where we want to end up.”
The Green Party of Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) proposed the idea in its 2019 platform, which called the shared practices “medical hubs.” The Liberals’ platform from four years ago also called for a system like this.
This time around, the Greens, Liberals, and NDP are all on board with the idea of making it easier to work together.
The Tories say there will be 14 by the end of this month, and if they are re-elected, there will be 30 by the end of 2024.
Concerns on staffin
How to staff those and the health care facilities that are already on the Island is a different question.
The Liberals say they will expand nurse training programs on the Island and pay nurses and family doctors more to get more of them to work there.
“Right now, our salaries are not as good as those in Atlantic Canada… So when people look for jobs, they will look at that “The head of the PEI Nurses’ Union, Barbara Brookins, said this.
The union’s contract with Health P.E.I. ended two years ago, and nurses were recently told that negotiations are on hold until a new government can be sworn in, sometime in June.
Sharon Cameron, the leader of the Liberal Party, said that treating health care workers with more respect would help with hiring.
People don’t want to work there because they know it’s dangerous, Cameron said.
“They know that when people are recruited, some of the promises they make to them aren’t kept.”
Some other promises to make it easier to find and keep good health care staff:
- All of the parties have promised to make it easier for doctors who studied abroad to get their licenses.
- The Tories would also make an associate physician license that would let foreign-trained doctors work in a limited way.
- The PCs are offering free college to licensed practical nurses, licensed care workers, and paramedics who train on Prince Edward Island and work here for two years.
- The NDP would start a provincial travel nurse program, which sounds like a promise from the PCs’ 2022 budget to set up a float pool of 25 nurses, which doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
- The Greens have said that they will make a training program for physician assistants. The Greens, the NDP, and the PCs all want to use physician assistants to help out in places like emergency rooms.
Different groups have different ideas about medical school
Plans for a medical school at the University of Prince Edward Island would go forward, according to the PCs and the NDP. The Greens and Liberals say they would put these plans on hold until some kind of review is done.
The Greens want a feasibility study, which it doesn’t look like the province has done even though it has put tens of millions of dollars into the project.
Peter Bevan-Baker, leader of the Green Party, said, “Everything here is backwards,” because promises were made before questions were asked and answered.
“We’re going full speed ahead with a building that we don’t know how much it will cost or if it’s the best way to make our system stronger in the long run….
“Right now, it’s very clear that our health care system and the doctors and nurses who work in it can’t support what’s being proposed.”
University of Prince Edward Island faculty, Health P.E.I. senior administrators, and the P.E.I. Medical Society have all questioned the plan to build a medical school at UPEI to train more family doctors. They say that the teaching requirements would put too much stress on local doctors who are already overworked.
In a similar way, the Greens, Liberals, and NDP have all promised to increase the number of residency spots on Prince Edward Island so that doctors from other provinces can train there. The PCs have said they will set up a residency program for doctors who work in emergency rooms.
More walk-in clinics and more virtual car
The Greens, Liberals, and PCs all promise to make it easier for people in the province to get to walk-in clinics. All three parties also say they want to increase access to virtual care, and the Greens and PCs say services like Maple should be free for all residents, not just those without family doctors. (So does Canada’s minister of health.)
Michelle Neill, the leader of the NDP, has said that no public money should go to private health care providers like Maple.
“We can’t let that happen with taxpayer money,” said Neill.
“We need to make sure that those public funds stay in our public system and go straight to the front lines for our nurses, doctors, PCWs, and RCWs. All of these people work together to make sure that all Islanders get the care they need.”
Health care with or without politic
Derek Key stepped down as chair of the board of Health P.E.I. at the end of last year because he was worried that political interference was making it hard for the health authority to work independently of the government.
The Greens have promised to make changes to the law that will create a wall between the agency and the premier’s office.
On the other hand, the Liberals say they will make the job of premier more important.more In the first two years of a new Liberal government, the premier would also be the minister of health. This would get the government more involved in health care.
The Liberals have also said that they will set up a separate ministry for mental health.
So far in the campaign, there have been a lot of promises about health care, but few of them have come with a price tag. As of Monday, no party had put out a costed platform, and few of the promises made so far had dollar amounts attached to them.