Medical Society Raises Concerns About Health-Care Reforms

The New Brunswick Medical Society is raising concerns about sweeping reforms to the health-care system.

On Tuesday, the Horizon and Vitalité health networks announced six communities will lose their emergency room services overnight.

“The medical society is quite aware of the challenges … in terms of our current health-care system and what things are going to look like if we don’t look to change what’s going on now and look for innovative solutions,” said Dr. Chris Goodyear, president of the society.

Goodyear said physicians were not part of the original decision-making process but were consulted by the government once the regional health authorities had their plans in place.

He said the society expressed several concerns raised by members, including the stress this will place on Ambulance New Brunswick.

“If these emergency rooms are going to stop accepting patients at 10 p.m., what’s in place or what changes are you going to make to Ambulance New Brunswick to make sure that patients are not kept in these emergency rooms when they need to be transported to the nearest emergency room that’s going to take them,” said Goodyear.

Physicians are also worried about the ripple effect the overnight closure will have on those nearby ERs, said Goodyear.

“We’re already seeing stresses in a lot of these ERs right now,” he said. “Government has reassured us that they are looking at that and that they are going to address that, but we haven’t heard anything back concrete in terms of ‘here’s exactly what’s going to happen.'”

In late January, the province announced it would add 32 new nurse practitioners to help reduce wait times at four emergency departments and reduce the waitlist for a family doctor.

Six of those nurse practitioners will be hired in the communities which are losing their overnight emergency department hours.

Goodyear said nurse practitioners have a role to play but will not solve all of the problems.

“The addition of nurse practitioners to the overburdened urban emergency departments is not going to fix that problem of patients that are waiting to be seen with emergent health-care issues,” he said.

Goodyear said the medical society will monitor the impact of the changes to ensure they “reflect the future needs of our health system and that patient safety is not negatively impacted.”