RHAG Co-chair Pat Estabrooks
Pat Estabrooks, Co-chair of the Rural Health Action Group, appealed to Tantramar Town Council yesterday for communications staffing support to help recruit more medical professionals to the area and to help keep the public informed about health-care issues.
“You have to be our partners,” Estabrooks said.
“If we’re going to make any changes in health care and get nurses and doctors into our community, it has to be a request from all of Tantramar and Strait Shores,” the former Sackville mayor added.
“That’s the only way we’re going to work this out.”
Her request came as the volunteer group, known by the acronym RHAG, presented its latest Health Action Plan outlining progress so far and listing a number of long-term priorities for Tantramar and Strait Shores.
Health priorities
RHAG Co-chair Margaret Tusz-King showed slides summarizing the group’s seven-page report that calls for restoration of 24-hour, seven-day-per-week emergency room service at Sackville Memorial Hospital, the provision of family medical services for every citizen, better mental health services and shorter ambulance response times.
Under its contract with the provincial government, Ambulance New Brunswick, operated by the private company Medavie, is required to respond to calls within nine minutes in urban areas and within 22-minutes in rural ones.
The RHAG report cites figures showing a sharp decline in rural response times from 90% until 2015-16 to a low of 72.7% in 2022-23, and below 45% in the Port Elgin region.
‘Squeaky wheel’
Tusz-King also cited figures showing there are 19,596 patients in local Zone 1 who are on the NB Health Link waiting list for a family doctor or nurse practitioner while another 14,201 are still waiting to get on that waiting list.
RHAG Co-chair Margaret Tusz-King
She pointed to some progress as the new primary care clinic across the parking lot from Sackville’s hospital begins whittling away at the list of patients whose doctors closed their practices in the last couple of years.
Councillor Bruce Phinney asked how that clinic works.
He said when he went there last December, he was told he was on the list and to expect a call in January.
“I haven’t got a call yet,” he said.
“What we’re saying to people is to go down and say, ‘I haven’t been called yet,'” Tusz-King replied.
“Be a bit of a squeaky wheel. We understand that of all the people on those lists, they’ve seen about 800,” she said, adding that these are people with chronic conditions such as diabetes.
“The rest of us who aren’t on that short list are still waiting.”
Judy Morison, a retired nurse who is also an RHAG volunteer, said the clinic says it’s adding 20-30 patients a week and those numbers should start to increase with the recent addition of a new doctor and nurse practitioner.
To read the full, seven page RHAG Health Action Plan, click here.
Recruitment efforts
Meantime, Tourism and Business Development Manager Ron Kelly Spurles reported to council that he had gathered the names of about 35 newly graduated doctors when he attended a two-day medical conference last month in Halifax.
He said the doctors, who are completing their medical training as residents in various health-care facilities, expressed interest in visiting Tantramar.
“We gave out some shirts and we ran out of shirts and some of them wanted us to send them shirts and I think that’s a good sign,” he said.
“They just wanted to be made aware of any opportunities to learn more about Tantramar.”
Medical scholarship
Mayor Andrew Black
In his mayor’s report to council, Andrew Black said that on October 15, he took part in the 2024 Scholarship Gala hosted by the New Brunswick Medical Education Foundation in Saint John.
The mayor said he met medical student Syed Ahmed who is getting scholarships from Green Party MLA Megan Mitton as well as the Sackville Hospital Foundation and the Town of Tantramar.
“We invested, I think it’s $25,000 in total,” Black said.
“His parents are both doctors in Miramichi and he was born and raised in Miramichi, knows New Brunswick, went to Mount Allison, knows our community very well and is now finishing his medical school at Dal,” he added.
Black noted that in return for the scholarship, Ahmed has pledged to practice in Tantramar after graduation.
For more details, click here.
I wish people were more sophisticated and understood human nature instead of thinking in simplistic terms. Their ideas and their desires are not realistic at all. Imagine being a qualified nurse or doctor and being told that you MUST STAY HERE by a “community group” or given money for your education on the basis you must stay put even if the money you could make as a doctor elsewhere, such as America, would we well worth breaking any contract you signed to stay here. Simultaneously there are extremely noisy and ongoing proclamations that we could all be underwater at any time due to a looming tidal wave we cannot hold back from the Bay of Fundy. I am not sure why there is so much cognitive dissonance going on here. It just concerns me that people honestly believe you can nail people to the spot and have them stay like they are mannequins you can pose and use.. you can’t. People leave for more money and other reasons.. that’s the reality and apparently they don’t like to stick around here for some reason. No one can figure out why that might be though…. Why is Ron Kelly Spurles the tourism manager taking trips to Nova Scotia to recruit doctors for our town? It really makes zero sense to me to see him put himself out there attempting to “court” young doctors-to-be… like much of what he does.. including holding up his cell phone to film me when in the past I have attempted to talk to him about the Tantramar Skate Park Project and how it would draw tourism and also give the youth a great place to hang out and play away from screenlife. I wouldn’t imagine that Horizon gives a toss about the opinions of anyone here at all.. they’re a bloated bureaucracy to say the least.
Are you aware that there are many employers who offer a “Work for us for X number of years and we’ll do…” quid pro quo deals?
Offering to pay tuition to school in exchange for working locally isn’t all that out there.
As for going to NS to recruit doctors – that’s because the only doctor training in the Maritimes IS in NS at Dalhousie. I think after that the closest would be Memorial in NFLD and Montreal. So if we want doctors, we gotta go to the source. And really, Ron Kelly Spurles is the tourism AND BUSINESS manager for the town. So perhaps finding doctors to do, you know, their BUSINESS, in Sackville would allow the BUSINESS manager to go speak for the town.
Is RHAG already working with the incoming government of the Liberals to see that their priorities are known and being worked on?
Has anyone from the group spoken to the OTHER layers of Health Care about their issues as well? (Housekeeping, Kitchen, Clerks, etc)?
What has been the input of Horizon about these issues?
The fact that the community and staff at the SMH are kept in the dark about a lot of things going on – has anyone brought that up as an issue as well?
Getting more doctors and nurses is great, but it won’t matter if underlying issues these groups and other staff have, are not addressed as well.