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Petition
Presented May 19, 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 another
opportunity to present a petition on behalf of the
residents of François, Gray River and Ramea, with
respect to the shortage of trained staff at the Ramea
Medical Clinic.
There are supposed to be
two nurse practitioners there. We only have one, and
that lady has, in fact, been there for some years. She
is a resident of Ramea and is quite happy and quite
contented there. The problem, of course, is she can’t
work twenty-four seven 365. We have a constant ongoing
problem of trying to have sufficient support staff for
her.
Now, in some cases we get
an LPN. There is an LPN, in fact, who is now engaged on
a full-time basis, but an LPN can’t perform all of the
services, of course, of a nurse practitioner. Even
though we are undergoing some training with the nurse
practitioner right now – and I think it is a matter of
six or eight weeks that it takes to train a nurse
practitioner. She is, by the way, voluntarily engaged in
doing that training. She needs to go to Calder in Burgeo,
as well as in Corner Brook, to get some of the training
that she needs. She still won’t be able to perform all
of the services of a nurse practitioner.
Basically, that clinic is
down to 50 per cent of its personnel. There is a
shortage in Port aux Basques, for example, as well as in
Stephenville and Corner Brook, but as opposed to having
one out of a system in those larger areas, when you take
one of the two away, you obviously have a more drastic
problem here.
We proposed a solution to
the minister again. They talk about recruitment and
retraining, and it is not a complicated solution. They
already, right now, you allow anyone who is a first-year
graduate or someone who is from outside the Province to
avail of the recruitment bonuses. It is not permitted,
right now, to allow anyone in the Province to avail of
that.
Our suggestion is, if you
are dealing with rural Newfoundland – and government
acknowledges we sometimes have needs that are different
in rural communities than we have in larger communities,
for example. So our suggestion and the community’s
suggestion that was posed to the minister was: Why not
allow the recruitment bonuses to apply to anyone who is
in the system, who might avail of that opportunity to go
serve a period of time in the community of Ramea?
Again, it is a matter of
informing the minister, letting the minister get tuned
in. This is my eighth time doing this. I do not know if
he is tuned in or not yet. Everybody in Ramea, everybody
in François, everybody in Grey River is tuned in. I
think I have tuned in the other 512,000 people in the
Province, but whether the Minister of Health knows about
it or not now is anybody’s guess, because he has not
even acknowledged yet that he is aware of the problem.
Anyway, Mr. Speaker, I
appreciate the opportunity. I will continue to press
this most urgent need upon the Department of Health and
the Minister of Health and Community Services, and
hopefully, hopefully, some time in the near future he
will either respond himself or have someone in the
department or someone in Western Health address this
problem.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. |
