Health-care solutions should go beyond medical homes and neighbourhoods, P.E.I. Greens say

The "medical homes and neighbourhoods" model being developed by the province's Progressive Conservative government won't solve all of P.E.I.'s current health-care problems, says Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker.

Allowing everyone involved in health-care delivery to maximize what they can do — including pharmacists and nurse practitioners — is also necessary, he said in an interview with Island Morning host Mitch Cormier.

"Nurse practitioners should be able to have their own panel of patients. They should be able to work independently in walk-in clinics, and they need to be utilized in our ERs — all of these places where we're currently struggling to deliver those primary-care frontline services," Bevan-Baker said. 

"These are all changes that could be made very quickly that would make a significant difference immediately."

Bevan-Baker was responding after P.E.I. Premier Dennis King met with his counterparts from Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Moncton on Monday to discuss ways to address problems with Canada's health-care system.

King touted new approaches as the best way forward — such as P.E.I. developing a team-based care model it is calling medical homes and neighbourhoods, where patients see different health professionals according to their needs, as opposed to traditional approaches based on everyone seeing a family doctor for every issue.

"The delivery of health care on P.E.I. and across the country is going to be fundamentally different than it used to be, [and] I think it needs to be," King said Monday.

Barbara Brookins, president of the P.E.I. Nurses' Union, also suggested nurse practitioners could be better used in the health-care system by giving them their own panels of patients and allowing them to hold walk-in clinics. 

But she said the more urgent matter is finding ways to retain nurses who have been working on Prince Edward Island for years.

"The ones that are coming in, they're being offered big incentives to come to P.E.I. to work, and you know, as soon as they fulfilled their return-to-service agreement of one to two years, they leave again.

"And meanwhile, our Island-born and -bred nurses who were holding the system together are getting absolutely nothing right now."