Liberals call for emergency House session to address health care, recent deaths
“. . .
“The public really has no window into this alarming trend that we are seeing, increasing deaths in ERs, increasing wait times and the overall strain on our health-care system,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said.
“This is why we need a public investigation of this; we need an independent body to tell us why this is happening and hopefully assist us and assist the government in figuring out how to fix it.”
Chender said it is “clear in both of these cases that people were waiting much longer than they should have been and that the triage process broke down, so after they were initially triaged they were not appropriately assessed again.”
A staffing crisis in hospitals and a shortage of beds and space are the presumptive culprits, she said.
“That’s a systemic problem, not an individual problem but this is the problem that we have to solve and it’s not a quick fix.”
Chender said the province has to keep its population healthier and to ensure access to timely primary care when people get sick.
“This is why we spend so much time talking about collaborative care,” she said. “That primary care could be a physician, it could be another member of a care team. We need to make sure that when they go to the hospital they can get primary care in the emergency room, when they call 911 a paramedic will show up within the time specified by contract. Ultimately, when they need long-term care, when they need to transition out of hospital, that there is a place for them to go.”
Chender said those needs are widely agreed upon but the question is how to get there.
“At the root of it, we need to attain the health-care staff that we have and to make sure that systems are in place so that people don’t fall through the cracks and, ultimately, we don’t have the stories like we heard this week of families using loved ones.”
. . .
Chender said she is not sure what an emergency House session would do to alleviate the health-care problem.
“We always welcome an opportunity to do our job as legislators and to press the government, particularly in this case a government that was elected to fix health care on how they are going to deliver the promises they made to Nova Scotians. As the Liberals have recognized and as we have recognized, we don’t particularly need more politicalization of this issue. What we need are better outcomes.””