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Petition
Presented May 4, 2009
Lack of medical services at the Ramea Clinic
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MR. SPEAKER: The
hon. the Opposition House Leader.
MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Thank
you, Mr. Speaker.
I appreciate the
opportunity to present this petition on behalf of the
residents of Ramea, Grey River and François, and that
concerns the lack of health care facilities or services
being offered in those communities.
The clinic is set up in
Ramea; they do weekly coastal visits to Grey River and
to François. The problem is, the facility calls for two
nurse practitioners and they currently, and for several
months now, have only had one. Western Health has been
trying to recruit but they have been unable to do so.
They have tried to supplement with LPNs; they have tried
to have the nurses from Burgeo come across to shore
things up in the short term but that does not allow, for
example, for weekend coverage.
If something happens in
Ramea on a weekend, or Grey River or François, game
over in terms of getting any kind of medical treatment.
There is nobody there to look after you. Now that is
just unacceptable. The reason, of course, is the only
person you do have is currently working five days a
week, twenty-four hours a day on call and when the
weekends come, or at least two days per week, she needs
a break and it is just not healthy for her to be trying
to cover off on a twenty-four-seven basis all year
round.
The problem we have here,
and this has been brought to the attention again of
Western Health and they are trying their best but they
cannot get past the first base with the minister’s
office that makes the policy pieces. We hear a lot of
talk about retention and recruitment of nurses, and one
of the problems vis-à-vis this clinic is it currently
says that if you are prepared to go to Ramea, for
example, as a nurse practitioner, they will give you a
recruitment bonus of a certain number of dollars
provided you are a new graduate or provided you are from
outside the Province.
Now that is pretty
limiting. What we are saying is there are nurse
practitioners potentially in this Province who would be
prepared to go there. So why should the recruitment
bonus and these cases of rural Newfoundland where it is
difficult enough to recruit, why should that caveat be
placed upon that recruitment bonus and those benefits?
They should be allowed, we suggest, it makes common
sense, if you cannot get them there without the
recruitment bonus anyway, why would you restrict the
benefits of the recruitment bonus by restricting it to
new graduates and to people from outside this Province?
There may well be someone
here who is retired in one area of the Province but
would be prepared to go, even on an ad hoc basis, a
certain number of months a year to fill in, in places
like Ramea and other communities in this Province. Yet,
they cannot do it because the government in its
insistence upon seeing that what happens to one happens
to all, that it is just not going to happen. We have to
realize that not every community is the same, not every
community has the same needs. So therefore, you have to
- what is it they say, cut the cloth to fit the garment.
That is what we have here. You have to make your policy
be adaptable so that if it does not work for certain
reasons, and those reasons are pointed out to you, that
you change it so that it can fit and can work.
So again, I was there
this past weekend, and they had – in the case of this
weekend, they had about 150 people from outside who
happened to be in there for a convention. Now, it so
happened, we anticipated this, and in advance we were
able to get Burgeo to backstop because there were
numbers of people in the town, but you should not only
always be dependent upon Burgeo to send a nurse over
because you are going to have an event in your
community. Normal, permanent residents should not always
be contingent upon somebody coming from Burgeo to look
after them. Again, I suggest that it can be done quite
easily by changing the recruitment bonus. That is one of
the tools that can be used by this government to
accomplish that.
I appreciate the
opportunity to bring this forward, Mr. Speaker, on
behalf of those residents. |
