GUYSBOROUGH: With one of the two health care facility managers in the municipality retired and the other set to retire within the coming year, and the continued lack of doctors to service the local emergency rooms within the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG), Warden Vernon Pitts suggested they aren’t in a better place than they were a few years ago.
“It always comes down to a point of smoke and mirrors, sometimes what you actually see is not really what’s going on,” Pitts told reporters following their regular, monthly council meeting on Nov. 16. “You read in the paper, Guysborough has three to four doctors, everything is rosy, but it’s not that way.”
It’s great, Pitts said, that they do have the doctors, but they’re still faced with the complications of having their emergency rooms closed, as well as having their hospitals closed on certain days and evenings.
“That’s not fair,” he said. “I think the province should be making steps, that if you can’t get a doctor, at least have someone; myself as a resident, a taxpaying resident of the province of Nova Scotia, I have no problem going to the hospital if there is a first responder that receives me, can triage me and pass me on.”
The warden suggests that in this day and age, there is no need for telemedicine.
“Multi-million dollar hospital, but nobody is working,” Pitts said. “We have to address that, we’ve been trying to address it, but it’s like trying to blow molasses uphill; it just doesn’t work.”
To address some recruitment challenges, the province announced financial assistance for municipalities to assist in their recruitment efforts.
“From what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing, as late as today, is money is not an issue with the doctors,” Pitts said. “I think our major problem is, we’re not all on the same page here; when we can take in a doctor from England, Scotland or Bermuda, and they are not qualified to practice medicine in the province of Nova Scotia, there’s something wrong with that.”
Pitts believes they need to move away from this formula.
“How many times have you heard me say, if the doctor was good enough for the Queen of England,” he said. “He or she is certainly good enough for Vernon Pitts from Lundy.”
As for the municipality’s $100,000 financial incentive for doctors, Pitts suggested the municipality earmarked $600,000 for that incentive program, noting there’s still a substantial portion of the funds still remaining.
“We’re putting $100,000, the province is putting $100,000, god knows how much more is out there,” he said. “Money is not the issue.”
The warden suggested he’d rather see someone with a First-Aid certificate running their emergency rooms, than no one.
“Even if you don’t have a doctor, don’t close it,” Pitts concluded.