John Higham is not very hopeful about the shake-up in New Brunswick health care announced last week by Premier Blaine Higgs. In fact, the former Sackville mayor and co-chair of the Rural Health Action Group says he is “hugely disappointed” in Higgs’ announcement on Friday that he is firing Horizon CEO John Dornan, dissolving Horizon and Vitalité boards, and shuffling his cabinet ministers around to put Bruce Fitch in charge of health and Dorothy Shephard in charge of social development.

Higham has been involved in defending health care services in Sackville since the “first significant threat” to the hospital took place while he was mayor, in February 2020. Since then, the overarching issue he’s observed is that “health services have just been divorced from community needs and desire to help.”

Higham felt the work he and the other volunteers of the Rural Health Action Group have done in the past while was working towards changing that.

“We saw some great progress in the last few years,” Higham says, “particularly with our collaboration with Horizon and with Dr. Dornan’s understanding of what he saw in rural [health], and what was required. And now I just don’t see any of that. I’m really frustrated with this announcement.”

Here the full interview with John Higham here:

Just two days before Higgs fired Dornan and dissolved the Horizon health board, the Rural Health Action Group released an update on its progress, noting a number of new and imminent nursing hires to work in the Sackville hospital. Higham credits that progress with the “collaboration and understanding” the group has had recently with the Horizon team led by Dornan. No doubt the hiring of former Sackville nurse Nancy Parker to help recruit and retain nurses is related to the recent success.

‘If you’re going to lose Dr. Dornan, you may lose that initiative’

Dornan had developed a reputation for taking criticism and accepting responsibility. In December 2021, a few days after the latest announcement on service cuts at the Sackville Hospital, Dornan and his senior staff attended a Sackville town council meeting via video conference and got an earful from local councillors and health care advocates. At the time Dornan told councillors he understood they were, “angry, upset, distrustful. We’ve earned some of that. And I’m asking to be given a chance to recreate that trust and earn that back.” It was the beginning of what Higham describes as a period of “collaboration and understanding.”

Looking back, Higham says, “what I saw was that Dr. Dornan was seeding an expansion of the role of communities in health services.” In the ensuing weeks and months, Horizon hired Parker, and collaborated on a health care recruitment website.

On July 13, the day before the Rural Health Action Group released their optimistic update, Dornan told CBC Information Morning host Khalil Akhtar that one of the Sackville hospital’s operating rooms could be put to use doing less complex orthopedic surgeries to help alleviate a regional backlog. In the same interview, Dornan applauded surgeons for speaking out publicly about their situation and making the decision not to further add to waitlists.

Higham describes Dornan as open to questioning.

“We challenged him multiple times early on, and he always responded with ‘that’s a good question, that’s a good answer, I will get back to you’. He challenged his staff to work with community groups,” says Higham, adding that he’s heard similar positive feedback on Dornan from other communities. “If you’re going to lose Dr. Dornan, you may lose that,” says Higham, “that initiative and that attempt to move that direction.”

“I’m hoping that some of the voices will stand up to say, let’s not lose this,” says Higham.

Trustees appointed to replace boards have not yet visited with Rural Health Action Group

In addition to firing Dornan, Higgs also dissolved the current boards of both Vitalité and Horizon health networks, which were made up of partially appointed and partially elected representatives. Higgs fired them all, and has instead put in place a single trustee in each network: Suzanne Johnston for Horizon Health and Gérald Richard for Vitalité.

Those names might sound familiar to anyone following the health care reform saga in New Brunswick. Both were already appointed by Higgs in November 2021 to head up a task force on implementing the province’s reform plan. In June, they held a news conference to update on their progress, mentioning much-lauded projects such as Port Elgin’s Nursing Home Without Walls program. Richard told reporters that part of the mandate of the task force was meeting people in their communities. But as of last Saturday, neither Johnson nor Richard has met with the members of the Rural Health Action Group. And now that they have executive control over the health networks, it’s not clear if Johnson and Richard will maintain their task force mandate.

“We’ve now got no board, no elected officials, appointees… A group of people that are now taking over with no understanding of what we’ve been doing with communities or what the results have been,” says Higham. “It’s a tragedy, the event that led to all this, but the larger picture to me is that it’s going the wrong way. We’ve got centralized and unaccountable health services now.”