With a new collaborative care clinic and staffing issues resolved at the Tantramar Primary Health Care Centre, residents still waitlisted for a primary care provider should hopefully receive a call between now and March to connect them with a provider.
Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton hosted a public health care update on Oct. 14 at the Sackville Legion where, among other things, a representative from Horizon Health Network confirmed the latest patient numbers.
In Port Elgin, there are 42 unattached patients, in the Memramcook/Dorchester region there are 79, and in Sackville there are 270, said Sarah Brown, interim director of primary care for Zone 1 (Moncton) with Horizon Health.
“ This leaves us with a historical total of 381 unattached individuals who will be onboarded with the target of the end of fiscal year, so end of March. (A) very realistic goal for the Tantramar Health Centre, Port Elgin Health Centre, and then another team as well that’s formed in Sackville that I’ll share a little bit on briefly.”
Listen to the audio below:
While details on that other team were scarce, with Brown not even sure where the clinic was located, she was able to say it was comprised of four physicians who work part-time in the Sackville Memorial Hospital’s emergency department, and that two have a full roster of patients, and the other two are actively onboarding new patients.
The clinic will also have three nurses and an admin team and work is being done to faciliate access to the allied health team at the existing Tantramar Clinic for patients of the new collaborative care clinic, said Brown.
Some of those professionals include a physiotherapist, dietitian, pharmacist, social worker and respiratory therapist.
Brown also shared that the Tantramar Clinic has plans to recruit additional nurses and admin, as well as allied health professionals, once they get into their new location in the York Building in downtown Sackville, which will finish the drawing phase in the coming months, she said.
In her opening remarks, Mitton mentioned one of the bigger issues facing the health care system is an increase in alternative level of care patients, or ALCs, she said.
“ I don’t like to call them that because I like to really underline what it means. They are forced to be in hospital, sometimes for months. I know of some people it’s been over a year. And this happens in hospitals across the province, and it’s often a third of the beds are people who shouldn’t be there.”
It was a point Jean-Pierre Savoie, vice president of Ambulance New Brunswick, mentioned in his presentation as one of the reasons for an increase in offload delays when crews arrive at a hospital or emergency department.
Savoie also said over the last decade, provincially they are missing about 28 per cent of their workforce, while call volume has increase by 44 per cent. To address this, Ambulance NB has added a multi-patient transfer unit and a rapid response unit for calls triaged by 911 dispatch that don’t require an ambulance.
Recruitment and retention efforts are also going well, he said.
The last hour of the two-hour update focused on questions from the audience. Some were curious about the aforementioned collaborative care clinic, and a few folks spoke up about concerns around parking, particularly when the Tantramar Clinic moves to its new location and in light of the changes Mount Allison has made to its campus parking.
Tantramar Mayor Debbie Wiggins-Colwell was in the audience and said she had met with the developers as well as the president of Mount Allison, who were working with the municipality on a plan, though she didn’t go into any more details.
Other concerns involved the proposed gas plant in Centre Village as well as the cellphone tower going up near the retention pond in Sackville, though after a few initial questions around tracking the negative health consequences of the projects and how a strained system might handle an increase in chronic illnesses associated with them, it started to turn into a conversation no longer related to the health update.
Mitton acknowledged the strong feelings of those in the audience around the projects, noting she felt the same, and reminded them of the Voice of the People Rally set for Oct. 20 in Fredericton, where their energies may be better spent.
The full audio of the event can be found here.
