The “medical properties and neighbourhoods” mannequin being developed by the province’s Progressive Conservative authorities will not clear up all of P.E.I.’s present health-care issues, says Inexperienced Social gathering Chief Peter Bevan-Baker.
Permitting everybody concerned in health-care supply to maximise what they will do — together with pharmacists and nurse practitioners — can also be essential, he mentioned in an interview with Island Morning host Mitch Cormier.
“Nurse practitioners ought to be capable to have their very own panel of sufferers. They need to be capable to work independently in walk-in clinics, they usually should be utilized in our ERs — all of those locations the place we’re at the moment struggling to ship these primary-care frontline companies,” Bevan-Baker mentioned.
“These are all modifications that might be made in a short time that will make a big distinction instantly.”
Bevan-Baker was responding after P.E.I. Premier Dennis King met together with his counterparts from Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Moncton on Monday to debate methods to deal with issues with Canada’s health-care system.
King touted new approaches because the greatest approach ahead — corresponding to P.E.I. growing a team-based care mannequin it’s calling medical properties and neighbourhoods, the place sufferers see completely different well being professionals in line with their wants, versus conventional approaches primarily based on everybody seeing a household physician for each subject.
“The supply of well being care on P.E.I. and throughout the nation goes to be essentially completely different than it was once, [and] I believe it must be,” King mentioned Monday.
Barbara Brookins, president of the P.E.I. Nurses’ Union, additionally instructed nurse practitioners might be higher used within the health-care system by giving them their very own panels of sufferers and permitting them to carry walk-in clinics.
However she mentioned the extra pressing matter is discovering methods to retain nurses who’ve been engaged on Prince Edward Island for years.
“Those which might be coming in, they’re being supplied huge incentives to return to P.E.I. to work, and you recognize, as quickly as they fulfilled their return-to-service settlement of 1 to 2 years, they depart once more.
“And in the meantime, our Island-born and -bred nurses who have been holding the system collectively are getting completely nothing proper now.”
