ANTIGONISH: The provincial government said more than 1,000 Nova Scotians were involved in a series of community health care conversations that took place locally late last year.
According to a press release issued earlier this month, the province said it recently wrapped up “one of the largest public health care tours in the province’s history,” which included sessions in Antigonish, Port Hawkesbury, and Inverness.
“I think what was really important is that we were in the community and we have those links. People don’t need us to synergize that information necessarily for them, they’re able to actually go and sit, have a look at what’s going on in their community. It may be more specific actually, if folks have a chance to look at it versus us rolling everything out,” Health and Wellness Minister Michelle Thompson told The Reporter. “For us, as a quad county, they can see and understand what’s happening locally, which I think in some cases is more meaningful because the provincial flavour is there, and then more localized questions are there as well.”
The tour included 20 sessions, covering more than 5,300 kilometres from Yarmouth to Glace Bay, Liverpool, to Springhill, beginning in October, the province noted.
Thompson, along with Deputy Minister Jeannine Lagassé and Nova Scotia Health CEO Karen Oldfield, headed the meetings.
The province said staff working in primary care, public health, continuing care, addictions and mental health, and emergency care were at each community conversation to provide information and speak with participants.
“It was tour around the province to really hear directly from communities, how they’re feeling in terms of health care, what they felt their needs were, but also for us to spend some time talking about some of the things that we’re doing because there’s so much happening, in terms of what we’re doing in health,” stated Thompson. “It’s hard to get that information out to communities sometimes, so we wanted to go and give people an update, and just sit and be present in the community, and hear from people directly.”
Thompson, who is also Antigonish MLA, said the format worked well discussing issues like licencing requirements for professionals, incentives for recruitment, and how workers are retained.
“We also had local leadership, the people who are making those decisions because often people don’t have access to those folks either,” she said. “I feel like it was a good format and it introduced local leadership, as well as provincial leadership, to the community and the community was able to really talk about what they were feeling.”
One issue that stuck out for Thompson was around licencing, and that is something her government is working on, pointing to an announcement last week by the Nova Scotia College of Physicians and Surgeons that they will accept credentials from physicians in the United States.
“People really wanted to understand why people who are health care providers in other jurisdictions, particularly other counties, or internationally educated folks weren’t able to practice here, and what we were doing to correct that,” she said.
Another talking point was the fact that health care has changed from years ago, creating the need for a team approach, said Thompson. Based on what they heard, she said people are accepting of the changing roles of pharmacists, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, and physicians.
“We are more complex, society is more complex, we have more medications, we have more treatments, we’re living longer with illness, it’s more complicated, we have more information and we’re aging,” the minister stated. “A doctor 30 years ago, the majority of his patients were 30 years younger and so we are with an aging demographic.”
Thompson said the consultations provided an opportunity to look at urgent treatment centre models and the current state of emergency departments.
Thompson said the public sessions were also an opportunity to show communities that transport operators and using registered nurses to assist physicians have helped fill the gaps.
“Similarly with recruitment and retention, talking about recruitment bonuses and incentives, and how we have a real focus right now on rural communities,” she said. “Talking about wait times, talking about what it will look like when we have one referral point for physicians to refer people for surgical access, as opposed to all of these doctors trying to find the physicians or the surgeon with the shortest wait list.”
While the province has made progress, Thompson said there remains work to do in other areas, like communication.
“There are other things that are going to have to happen in increments,” she said. “In order for us to address surgical wait times, as an example, there’s a number of things that have to happen like a central registry, like recruiting our surgeons, like recruiting specialized OR nurses. Being able to talk about the incremental changes so that when we improve our licencing, it allows us to attract more physicians, when we look at our immigration streams and how we support health care workers, it’s going to support more OR nurses, as an example. The central registry shortens and it makes the referral process more efficient.”
And despite the deterioration of health care in recent years, the minister said people were “more hopeful” after attending the meetings.
With her government heading into the spring session of the Nova Scotia Legislature next week, Thompson said it will provide an opportunity to regroup. In the meantime, she said there will continue to be local meetings.
“And also to see what communities are looking for,” she noted. “There’s still localized meetings that are happening so I know that local leadership will often meet in communities if there’s some changes in health care.”
The Speak Up For Healthcare Tour in the fall of 2021 included visits with health leaders and providers, the province said, noting that directly informed Action for Health, the government’s plan to improve health care.
“When we were elected, we went out and we did a similar tour but we did it with health care workers specifically. We wanted to hear from health care workers about their experiences in health care and to hear their ideas about what would make it better for them,” noted Thompson. “A year into Action for Health, we wanted to go out to communities and talk to folks about their concerns.”
The province added that video recordings of the question-and-answer portion of each session are available at: https://novascotia.ca/community-healthcare-conversations/.