Plans to cut services drastically at the Sackville Memorial Hospital are off the table for now.
At Monday’s Sackville town council meeting, Deputy Mayor Ron Aiken gave an update on a July 29 meeting with government officials to talk about healthcare reform, including the news that reforms proposed in February are being shelved to make way for consultations.
“All reforms proposed in February for all these hospitals—the closing of ERs, acute care beds, and the day surgery—are off the table. All of them. So that we're starting from ground zero again.”
Aiken, along with the mayors of Perth Andover and Rogersville, met with Deputy Minister of Health Gérald Richard, Associate Deputy Minister Rene Boudreau, and director of planning, performance and alignment, Tracey Burkhardt. Aiken says the meeting was surprisingly congenial, considering the topic:
“I was ready for a bit of a tussle and the meeting was far more congenial than I expected. The points we went in with, essentially our agenda, were first of all, we asked what were the goals for the healthcare reform? And essentially, what problem were they trying to solve? We wanted to talk about the consultation process. We wanted data that led to concerns and to the solutions they proposed. We wanted to have ongoing communication and sharing of data. Our fifth point was that health care workers at all levels should be free to comment on the system without any fear of repercussion. And finally, our last point was that First Nations should be in all the consultations.”
Aiken says the government’s plan for the consultations is that the premier will first meet with all six communities that were impacted by the February announcement. Then a wider summit will be held.
“We insisted that we would be involved not only in the summit, but in the planning of it. So it wasn't the bureaucrats doing it all.”
Aiken says government officials shared binders-full of data, and told the town representatives that New Brunswick has the highest per capita health care spending in the country.
According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information, New Brunswick is actually middle of the pack in terms of per capita health care spending in Canadian provinces, and lowest among the Maritime provinces.
Aiken says the town reps asked about the quick turnaround in freeing up hospital beds at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.
“They said they simply took away people's choice. If you were in a hospital and had be sent to a home, you were sent to whatever home they could get you into.”
Aiken says the group expressed their concern with the management of Horizon and Vitalité.
“The boards of Horizon and Vitalité were in all aspects dysfunctional, they really seem to be out of touch with what the the problems were.”
They also made the point that communities are different and need to be treated according to different needs, and that healthcare decisions have wider social and economic effects.
“I stressed that Sackville, for example, has a university that none of the others do. And that they shouldn't be thinking of healthcare in a silo. I cited the suspension of the Lafford seniors property, the development of that property, as an example of something changing in healthcare can affect that, can affect recruitment to Mount A. So they weren't just working in only healthcare. There were ripple effects to what they were doing.”
Aiken says he and the two mayors, Pierrette Robichaud of Rogersville and Marianne Bell of Perth-Andover, are currently working on a final report on the meeting to be shared with all affected communities.