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Petition
Presented September 8, 2009
Cuts to Lab & X-Ray Services
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| In the House | Petitions
MR. SPEAKER: Further
petitions?
The hon. the Leader of
the Opposition.
MS JONES: Thank
you, Mr. Speaker.
I stand today to present
a petition on behalf of people in the Lewisporte area
who have been campaigning and lobbying government to
ensure that they do not have a cut in their X-ray and
laboratory services and facilities in that particular
region.
Mr. Speaker, these
petitions are signed by hundreds of people in that
region and I am assured that there are thousands of
people that are signing petitions that I am sure will be
sent along later. So you can look forward to a long fall
of these petitions, unless government is only just
kidding and decides to not cut the services in these
particular areas.
Mr. Speaker, this
petition is dealing with Lewisporte, but really it is no
different than Flower’s Cove. These decisions, Mr.
Speaker, to cut services in health care is always
usually dependent upon providing a better service for
people in a region or it is done as a means of saving
money for government.
When I listened to the
Minister of Health in his comments on the radio I was
absolutely astounded to learn that in making this
decision and hastily running out and communicating it to
the public, he did not even do diligence in looking at
whether this was a cost relative issue or not, whether
it was going to cost government more money or the
consumer more money, meaning the patient, or if it was
going to actually save money. To me, Mr. Speaker, that
was unbelievable because you would think that any
minister making a decision to cut services like this
would, first of all, look at all the facet of the
decision that they are going to make, and it is quite
obvious that he failed to do that in this case.
Mr. Speaker, this is
really an attack on primary health care in rural
regions. You can colour it up anyway that you want, Mr.
Speaker, but that is exactly what it is. Am I standing
here today saying that government should put a
laboratory and an X-ray in every single clinical
operation in the Province? That is not what I am saying,
but I am not saying that you should be cutting services
in areas where they have been provided and have worked
for fifty years to people in this Province. It is an
unacceptable decision for government to make, especially
at a time when they can financially afford to maintain
services like this to people in the Province. So, Mr.
Speaker, why would they do this?
I remember back in 2007
this same government went into Robert’s Arm, in Green
Bay, and they were going to close down the local clinic
that was there, the medical clinic. At the time, the
people really got out, they lobbied against it and at
the end of the day government reversed its decision.
That was an attack again on rural health care. If the
people in that area did not get out and fight that
decision, I am sure we would have seen more of it
happening.
So what I would say to
people in the Province, it might be the region of
Lewisporte petitioning government today but if you have
those services and you live in a rural area in this
Province, that you should be out there fighting to
defend and support the services that they get because
you could be next. |
