Blaine Higgs stands with a number of party members after his announcement August 24. (Photo: Ben Burnett)
Progressive Conservative leader Blaine Higgs announced his party wants to reduce wait times for knee and hip replacement surgeries for New Brunswickers.
The announcement came Monday at a campaign stop outside St. Joseph’s Hospital in uptown Saint John.
Higgs told reporters and a small, physically-distanced crowd of supporters the plan is to get wait times within the national standard.
“The national benchmark in Canada for such surgeries is six months,” the party leader said. “In the first quarter of the fiscal year of 2021, only 30 per cent of hip and knee replacement surgeries were done within that benchmark – not good enough.”
The three-part PC plan involves increasing patient capacity, a new centralized scheduling system, and implementing technology including virtual and tele-medicine access.
The first step in increasing capacity includes a plan for a new dedicated operating room for St. Joe’s.
“In doing so we’ll get better at predicting, anticipating surgery levels, and prioritizing those who need surgery sooner than others,” Higgs said.
After calling a snap election just last week, Higgs says his government will maintain the course they started when they formed government in 2018.
“We’ve only been at this for two years – we had COVID in the middle of it. We got started five weeks late,” said Higgs. “But we have a plan we’re implementing from our 2020 budget, and we’re staying on course to fix New Brunswick.”
Higgs also took the opportunity to introduce Arlene Dunn, who will run for the PCs in the Saint John Harbour riding.
Says the province will be up to national standard on wait times for 85% of hip replacement surgeries and 75% of knee replacement surgeries by end of March 2022. National standard is 182 days
— Ben Burnett (@bunbronett) August 24, 2020
