“Great plans” for area: MURPHY DISCUSSES HEALTH CHANGES
FREDERICTON - Minister of Health Michael Murphy says that both Campbellton and Dalhousie will benefit from changes in the provinces health care system, but it may be a while before these particular projects are announced.
In an interview last week, Murphy said that his department has "great plans for Dalhousie and Campbellton" but that it's going to take "a few months to get things together." He added that "they have a bright future in health care in New Brunswick."
Murphy said that the announcements will actually come from the Shared Services Agency, a new body that has been established to deal with the non-clinical side of health care. Murphy would not elaborate, but there has been speculation that a new laundry facility would be established in one of the two centres. Dalhousie mayor Clem Tremblay has been lobbying to have it in Dalhousie, but Campbellton-Restigouche Centre MLA and Speaker of the Legislature Roy Boudreau told The Tribune and La Voix du Restigouche months ago that it will be in Campbellton.
Murphy did say that there will be one laundry hospital in the "far north" and one in Saint John. Together, they will handle all hospital laundry in the province. He said that there would no longer be laundries in each hospital, as it would cost $15 million over three years to maintain so many separate laundries.
Murphy defended the decision to create two health regions based on language.
"There are cases from the Supreme Court of Canada with regard to language protection and where we're trying to have a standardized practice, standardized drugs an that across the province, and reduce administrative costs, we couldn't go down to simply one hospital authority. We had to protect the language rights and so we didn't designate one health authority as English and one health authority as French, but we did group together those that speak French primarily, although there are at least three hospitals that have half and half, in one group and in the other group we have the English speaking hospitals. So, in practical reality, it concerns the language of work of some of the institutions," he said.
He went on to say that the Official Languages Act makes it mandatory that "every single hospital in New Brunswick has to provide services in both official languages."
"We have one health care system in New Brunswick, with two administrative aspects to it: one with a grouping of Francophone hospitals with some that are bilingual, and one that is a grouping of Anglophone hospitals," Murphy said.
He was asked if this would make it more difficult to recruit English-speaking professionals to the north or French-speaking ones to the south.
"It will have no bearing on recruitment or retention, because right now, today, without any changes to what was there, all of the hospitals in New Brunswick have the right to have the working language of their choice, so it's not going to make any difference, at all," he said.
"The other thing, there's cross-pollination," he said, adding that this is a term they use to describe the boards of the two health authorities. Because hospitals in both regions will provide services to people from all parts of the province, there will be people from French-speaking members on the boards of the southern region and people from mainly English-speaking areas on the boards of the northern one.
Murphy was also asked why Bathurst had been selected for the headquarters of Region A (Francophone). He said that this is part of the northern initiative. "We've been bleeding jobs and people out of the north, and we've emphasized that rural New Brunswick and northern New Brunswick are going to receive and continue to receive health care that they deserve, regardless of the difficulties that they've had.... We see no reason why they shouldn't be at the forefront. We didn't see why a regional health authority in this day and age of technology needs to be run out of Saint John, Fredericton or Moncton. Saint John has the Shared Service Agency; Moncton has the Health Council; Bathurst and Miramichi have the regional health authorities."
When asked why Bathurst was chosen rather than Campbellton or Edmundston, Murphy said that once other things are implemented, people in the Bathurst area may be asking why they didn't get the operations that will be coming to Campbellton and Dalhousie.
"Everybody is going to share in this reorganization," he said.
A question raised by the former chairman of the Restigouche Health Authority, Edouard Maltais, was dismissed by Murphy. Maltais had suggested that with only one or two meetings per year in this area, people might have to travel as far as Moncton to bring issues to the attention of the health authority board.
He said that the boards will deal with clinical and economic matters. Issues of the sort Maltais mentioned would, instead, be addressed to the health council.
"The health council will be the vehicle by which their message is known, and there'll be more than phone calls; there'll be meetings, there'll be forums, citizen's juries. There's going to be, from the health council, performance management on the clinical side and the financial side, and this will be done not only for the entire heath care system, but, of course, in each and every area and institution as well," Murphy said.
"People in Campbellton and Dalhousie should know that, in fact, there'll be a much more efficient way of getting their message through than to wait for a public meeting of the regional health authority."
He was also asked if, with larger areas to be covered by the authorities, smaller institutions will suffer because their situations are not as well known to those in charge.
He said that there would still be vice-presidents for medicine and nursing and facility administrators and that this will ensure that all facilities are treated fairly.
"The realignment of the regional health authorities with the health council and the Shared Services Agency are administrative changes. They do not affect health care as New Brunswickers have (had) access in the past or will in the future," he said. "It's apples and oranges."
Finally, he said that "to somehow believe that reducing bureaucracy and the clutter in the hospital system is going to hurt regions or hospitals themselves is unfounded."
"The less clutter, the more accessibility in all the hospitals, including Campbellton," Murphy said. "There were too many hospitals that were becoming office buildings. We've put a stop to that."
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