Green Party leader David Coon addressing Sackville meeting last week on health care

New Brunswick’s Green Party leader will be campaigning on the need for big changes to the health care system in this year’s provincial election.

“Certainly health care is going to be the issue in the election, there’s no question about it,” David Coon told reporters last week during a meeting attended by about 50 people at the Sackville Commons on Lorne Street.

He said the province needs major investments to solve a wide range of problems including the chronic shortage of family doctors and nurses, long wait times in hospital emergency rooms and the lack of adequate home care.

“People are stressed and people are upset and people have had terrible experiences in the system and they want to see change,” Coon said.

Provincial tour

The Green leader was in Sackville as part of his province-wide tour speaking to health-care workers about the problems they’re facing.

“A physician and an ER nurse the other day were telling me, ‘We’ve got patients in the hospital who could go home if we knew they had home care that could support them, but it doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t be safe without that, so they’re going to a nursing home,'” Coon said.

He added that personal care home-support workers are choosing to go into the schools as educational assistants because they can earn more money there.

“I heard the finance minister say the other day, ‘We’ve got almost $250 million surplus projected and we have to spend it in the next five weeks.’

“So, I got thinking, ‘Well, why don’t you take a chunk of that and turn it into recruitment bonuses for those working in our health-care system and the long-term care sector?'” Coon said.

“What a difference would that make in terms of morale and start maybe sending us back on the track to recovery.”

‘Black hole’ budget

Green leader David Coon answers a question as local Green MLA Megan Mitton looks on

During his half-hour address and later during a question and answer period, Coon criticized past Liberal and Conservative governments for systematically cutting health spending beginning in the 1990s and then centralizing management of the system in two regional health authorities that respond, he says, poorly to local needs.

“Government after government after government has just seen the problem as the black hole of the health-care budget,” Coon said.

“That’s what they’ve been focussed on,” he added, “not the health-care system, but the budget.”

Coon said that instead of building relationships based on mutual respect with those working in the system and listening to their ideas for improving it, provincial governments have pinched pennies trying to save money.

He said he finally realized how serious this was a couple of months ago when the provincial party leaders were invited to address the association or college that represents family doctors.

“After the premier spoke, a family physician got up and said he wanted the premier to know he’d never felt so disrespected in his career as a family physician and the place exploded in applause,” Coon said.

“Wow, OK, so that’s got to change.”

Health Link, ‘a joke’

MLA Megan Mitton

Memramcook-Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton spoke about local issues including the lack of evening and overnight emergency room services in Sackville and the problems local people, who have lost their family doctors, are having getting access to the new health clinic near the hospital.

“I just sent a letter to the minister of finance and the minister of health calling on them to expand funding for the clinic,” Mitton said.

“What we need is primary care access in our communities, not just there, we also need it at the Port Elgin and Region Health Centre which is such a cool pilot project that they’ve never repeated elsewhere, but is actually a health-care clinic in a school.”

Mitton said the Horizon Health Network would be holding another question and answer session in Sackville on April 16th.

Meantime, she  called the NB Health Link program run by Medavie “a joke.”

It’s supposed to provide access to health care for people without a family doctor or nurse practitioner, but Mitton said 10,000 people in this region alone are on a Health Link waiting list.

“What’s happening with Health Link is a mess,” she said in response to a question about the growing privatization of health services.

Mitton said the province is paying Medavie $33,000 a month to administer Health Link.

The company also manages Ambulance New Brunswick, the provincial drug plan and New Brunswick’s extra-mural, home-care program.

No accountability

“We’re told they’re a non-profit,” Mitton said, adding that Medavie wouldn’t answer questions about its corporate structure or executive salaries when it appeared before a committee at the legislature.

“It’s not accountable to the public, there’s not enough transparency,” she said.

She pointed out that the government awarded the contract to manage the extra-mural program to Medavie with no tendering process or request for proposals.

“They’re just giving it away,” she said. “There’s no competition.”

For coverage of local opposition to the privatization of extra-mural home care, click here and here.