Health care crisis dominates N.B. Legislature's return

Health care dominated the debate at the New Brunswick Legislature Tuesday as the session resumed just days after the Higgs government missed a key, self-imposed deadline.

The Progressive Conservative health plan had promised to eliminate the provincial waiting list for family doctors by last Friday, the final day of September. 

"That wasn't met. Mr. Speaker, when are they going to meet that goal?" said Liberal MLA Rob McKee, the leader of the Official Opposition.

"Now they're saying sometime next year. Are they prepared to tell us today how they expect to meet that goal and what is their plan moving forward?"

Health Minister Bruce Fitch said the government was making progress on the target with "a significant number of people" coming off the list, but he did not provide any numbers.

"The work is continuing … to make sure the people on their wait list come off that wait list and are connected with a primary caregiver," he said.

Long emergency department wait times and ambulance offload delays, coupled with unplanned temporary closures of some hospital services, happened frequently over the summer and have persisted into the fall. 

Green Leader David Coon said Tuesday a constituent's father with dementia and pneumonia recently spent six days in a hospital hallway, where he could not get treatment to remove fluid from his lungs.

In July, Higgs replaced the boards of the two regional health authorities with trustees, fired the CEO of Horizon Health and shuffled Fitch into the position of minister.

Despite almost three months passing since those moves to "consolidate power" in his office, McKee said, "we've hardly heard a whiff of the new plan moving forward." 

Fitch said the system is providing access to surgery and to addiction and mental health services, and is connecting people to primary care providers. 

"I could go down under each one of those items and talk about how well we've moved forward on any number of these items," he said.

Fitch described a series of initiatives in the offing, including providing mobile x-ray machines and putting emergency medical technicians in ambulances, designed to provide an alternative to going to emergency departments.

The provincial health plan released last year set a Sept. 30 deadline for when the Patient Connect NB list — the wait list for a family doctor — would be "completely eliminated and replaced" by a primary care network allowing anyone to access a doctor or nurse practitioner "in a timely manner." 

McKee urged the fast adoption of multidisciplinary care centres proposed by new Liberal Leader Susan Holt.

Coon made a similar call, asking Higgs to direct the health authorities to "immediately" set up urgent-care centres. 

In a scrum with reporters, Premier Blaine Higgs said he agrees such clinics could be set up quickly, though he also said it would be hard to recruit enough doctors to staff them in the short term.

In the legislature, Higgs sounded more open to spending more money on health care after suggesting during the summer that increased funding was not the solution. 

"We will put money where we get results. … real results that people can feel," he said.

"That's where we'll invest our money and because our province is doing so well, we've got the money to do it." 

The province is projecting a $135 million surplus this year, though the last two years have seen budget surpluses far greater than forecast. 

Tuesday's exchange on health unfolded the same day Narrative Research reported that New Brunswickers perceive the system in increasingly negative terms.

The company said 85 per cent of respondents in the province felt the quality of the health-care system is fair or poor. Two years ago only 50 per cent of respondents felt that way.

Those in the survey had better opinions of the care they'd received personally, but those numbers are getting worse, too.

Fifty-three per cent said they were mostly or completely satisfied with their experience in the system, down from 75 per cent two years ago.

Most respondents cited access as the main problem, citing difficulty in getting appointments with doctors and specialists, or in having a family doctor at all.