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Petition
Presented May 12, 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 an
opportunity to have a few words and deliver a petition
to this hon. House on behalf of the residents of Ramea,
Francois and Grey River, and that is with respect to the
lack of nurse practitioners at the medical clinic in
Ramea, which services those communities not only through
the clinic but also through coastal clinics.
The clinic calls for a
quota of two nurse practitioners, but for many, many
months now they have only had the one and have been
unable to recruit the other. There have been several
options attempted to alleviate the situation. I must
say, we get good co-operation from the site facilitator
in Burgeo, Ms Porter. She tries her best - and the
officials, of course, from Western - but sometimes it is
a policy issue that prevents it from happening. I
understand there is actually a shortage of four nurse
practitioners in the Western district and you might not
notice it as much.
For example, there is one
in Port aux Basques, a vacancy. There is a vacancy in
Stephenville and there is a vacancy in Corner Brook.
Now, if you are down a nurse practitioner in a place
like Corner Brook or Stephenville or Port aux Basques,
you might not notice it, I would think, as much as you
would notice it in a facility where you only have two,
and nobody else. You do not have doctors, you do not
have RNs, you do not have LPNs, and you do not have
other nurse practitioners to fill the gap. In the Town
of Ramea you only have the two. There is no one else.
So, once you are down, you are down 50 per cent of your
working quota right there, and that is the problem, so
the urgency is obviously far greater if you are trying
to replace one person who is 50 per cent of your
workload, vis-ŕ-vis trying to replace one person who
might be 0.2 per cent of your workforce. That is why it
is so significant that we try to have an appropriate
policy which allows adequate recruitment and retention
for a person there.
The current policy of the
government for recruitment and retention only applies if
you are a new graduate or if you are someone from
outside the Province coming in. It has been suggested
that maybe a solution here would be to extend that in
the case of rural communities so that the recruitment
bonus that is given could be given to anyone.
If you are, for example,
a nurse practitioner in this Province, you may be
retired, you maybe have vacation time that you are
prepared to go work in Ramea, at least if the bonus were
provided for a person to go there, someone in that
capacity, retired, may be desirous of going there, but
there is no incentive right now for them to do that.
If the incentive
programming is good enough to use in other areas in the
Province, in urban areas and wherever we have shortages
– sometimes it is for a specialist, sometimes it is
for nurses, sometimes, in this case, it is for nurse
practitioners – why would we not make the policy fit
the circumstances, particularly when you have these
small, rural communities in our Province?
That is what is being
suggested here. It is being put forward to the officials
at Western, and they said they would see that was passed
on to the Department of Health and hopefully those
decisions can be made, because they cannot be made by
the people in Western. They have to be made by the
policy makers themselves, which would fall not at the
board level in Western Newfoundland but at the
department level, at least, in Confederation Building in
here in St. John’s.
That has been conveyed to
the minister and, again, we hope he at least reads the
correspondence and pays some attention to it. We cannot
say we have a good track record with this minister in
terms of responding. It is one thing to have a problem.
It is appreciated if you know that your problem is at
least acknowledged, and even that has not happened.
I am sure the minister
has enough staff that he could acknowledge the existence
of the problem and give some indication of what he
intends to look at, or the timelines in which he intends
to look at it.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. |
