RENEWING HEALTH
CARE
The New Vision: patient-focused,
community-based health care
Success Targets:
Stable, growing, long-term funding
for hospitals & health careservices
Better accessibility through more doctors, nurses,
and other health care professionals
Province-wide health standards with greater public
accountability
More community involvement in health care
decision-making
Improved care for seniors
Patient-Focused Health Care
New Vision • New Brunswick puts patients first.
It means changing the definition of "success" from simply "treating a patient"
to "treating a patient well" within defined time periods, to approved
quality standards.
Creating a new patient-focused,
community-based health care is at the heart of this vision to renew health care
for New Brunswickers. This begins with changing the formal mission of the
Department of Health and Community Services to adopt a new "patient-focused"
approach to health care. All health services and priorities must be and will be
evaluated from this perspective.
Setting the Record Straight: The
Liberal Health Care Betrayal
The Liberals have no plan for renewing
health care for New Brunswickers. After years of neglect and creating the very
problems that now exist, the Liberal government has resorted to funding gimmicks
like the Health Care Funding Guarantee Act to pretend to spend more on
health care. In fact, the opposite would be the case. If the Liberals had put
this Act in place when they first came to power, New Brunswickers would have
received $311 million less for health care.
The Liberal health care record has been
the worst in Atlantic Canada over the past four years and among the worst in all
of Canada. Under the Liberals, there have been service cutbacks, hospital
deficits, longer waiting lists, and a failure to plan properly to make health
care more accessible to families by providing enough doctors, nurses, and other
health care professionals.
New Brunswickers want a plan to renew
health care. They want an end to the "boom and bust" health care cycle of the
Liberal government. They want seniors to live in dignity with improved health
care and health services.
Our plan for Renewing Health Care
includes:
Secure, Growing Health
Funding
After years of Liberal cutbacks and
service downgrades, iIt is time to bring certainty, stability, and security to
health care funding. A growing, aging population means more demands, not less,
for health careservices. Health providers and professionals need to better plan
and deliver the health careservices New Brunswickers need. These needs can only
be met by having secure, growing health funding. We will do so
by:
- Increasing health funding each and every year
of our mandate.
- Establishing multi-year "health budget
envelopes" for health care guarantee increased funding levels for priority
patient services and allow for better planning and delivery of
services.
More Doctors; More Nurses
Doctors and nurses are on the
front-lines of our health caresystem. Unfortunately, a shortage of both of these
critical health professionals exists; a shortage that cannot be made up
overnight. Although 329 new doctors are needed to bring us up to the national
average, for example, we need to make an immediate start on filling the 40
Medicare-funded, but currently vacant physician positions. Improving
accessibility to services begins with hiring more nurses and doctors immediately
and developing longer-term hiring plans to ensure health care for families. We
will do so by:
- Creating up to 300 new permanent nursing
positions (staff nurses, nursing manager, nursing home nurses, public and
community health nurses) in the first 200 days of our mandate to address
immediate nursing care shortages across the province.
- Working closely with the nursing profession to
develop a comprehensive long-term nursing resource and professionalization
plan to ensure sufficient nurses are available in the future to meet
growing health needs.
- Making New Brunswick "Physician Friendly" by
undertaking a comprehensive Physician Recruitment Initiative to attract
new family physicians to practice in under-serviced of New Brunswick as
quickly as possible. This initiative should include such measures as offering
to pay tuition to medical students, covering interest payments on student
loans, cash signing bonuses, assistance with lease payments, and
administrative support for doctors’ offices, so long as they agree to practice
in designated under-serviced areas for a period of at least four years.. The
goal is to first, fill the 40 current funded physician vacancies within one
year and second, attract more physicians to fill the other gaps in services.
We will examine, with the medical profession, how to remove other
disincentives, including rural residency and community support issues, that
impact upon relocation decisions by doctors.
- Re-establish the practice of purchasing seats in
the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University.
New Regional Health Authorities &
Boards
A patient-focused health care system is
one where responsibility for service delivery closer to the patient. It
means a more integrated health care system with all health services and
initiatives, from hospitals to nursing homes to prevention, brought together in
seamless care that follows the patient, not the other way around. This will help
ensure that services and care are managed and delivered better to the people in
each region, with greater local community involvement and increased financial
and public accountability. We will do so by:
- Implementing a new model of health service
delivery of Regional Health Authorities and Regional Health
Boards.
- Restoring the cost-effective Extra Mural
Hospital to its proper provincial role with protected funding to ensure
its more effective use. Its services will be integrated under the new Regional
Health Authority model.
Provincial Health Standards and
Accountable Health Care
New Brunswickers want to be assured
that the services they receive are of excellent standard and quality, and are
performed in the most efficient and effective manner. Consumers want more
information on the health care they are receiving and want to participate more
in decisions affecting their health. To achieve these goals, we need to build a
more accountabilityle into health care system with clear, agreed to provincial
health standards of quality and accessibility. We will do so through the
following initiatives:
- Developing a new Patient Charter of
Rights and Responsibilities to ensure that the health caresystem focuses
on treating the patient based on clear expectations and understanding. We will
make certain that the patient always knows what level and quality of service
to expect and what their own responsibilities are to help ensure accountable,
cost-effective health care. Specific rights and responsibilities could
include:
- the right to be treated with respect, courtesy,
sensitivity and compassion
- the right to dignity and independence
- the right to the least intrusive
intervention
- the right to be fully informed, to understand
health information, and to give informed consent
- the right to complain and to be informed about the
outcome of the complaint
- the responsibility to provide full, accurate
information on health needs
- the responsibility to use health care resources
appropriately
- Establishing a new provincial Health Care
Report Card that sets out specific health standards, measuring performance
in meeting those standards and reporting results publicly to ensure both
excellent quality health care, and that each health dollar spent achieves the
best results. These standards could include ER access time, ambulance response
times, and waiting times for needed treatments and surgeries. Areas for
improvement will be identified and reported on publicly for all to see and
compare. Performance will be considered as a factor in providing funding for
high performing institutions. The Health Care Report Card will be developed in
close collaboration with health care stakeholders.
-
Creating a new, high-level
Premier’s Health Quality Council of consumers and health care
professionals and front-line providers to develop specific health
quality standards to ensure we are on track in our efforts to improve health
care services and to assist in our move to a more integrated, regionally-based
health system.
The Premier’s Health Quality Council
will have a 2-year mandate to:
- develop an action plan to move to a health
governance system of Regional Health Authorities and Regional Health
Boards;
- oversee the development and implementation of the
Health Care Report Card, health quality standards, and performance measures
such as specified waiting times for priority services;
- assist in the development of the Patient Charter
of Rights and Responsibilities;
- provide advice on implementing the recommendations
of the Health Services Review Report.
- Patient-focused health care needs advocates at its
centre – directly within the Department of Health and Community Services
itself. We will establish a senior-level Patient Advocate position with
a mandate to cut through red tape and help bridge the gap between patient
needs and services.
Wellness Strategy
A healthy province is more than just
having a dependable health care system. It results from having fit, healthy
people who practice good health habits in their daily lives. Preventing disease
and promoting good health in the first place is the surest way to have a healthy
population. Investing in wellness now not only saves the health system money,
but helps people live more enriching lives. We will do so
by:
- Developing a comprehensive Wellness
Strategy that helps New Brunswickers stay healthy longer.
- Establishing a Combating Disease Initiative
that specifically targets heart and cardiac disease, breast cancer, asthma,
and others through the development of integrated treatment and care strategies
for each.
Improved Care for Seniors
Seniors in New Brunswick have earned
the right to quality health care when and where they need it. We will bring
dignity and fairness back to the lives of seniors by improving their health
care. We will do so by:
- Restoring the daily funding rate for Level II
Special Care residents to $68 dollars per day
pending a full review of the
Level of Care policy in consultation with the Special Care Association of New
Brunswick and the New Brunswick Senior Citizens’ Federation
- Making it easier for couples assessed at
different levels of care to live together in the same long term care home.
- Strengthening the Prescription Drug Program
to ensure seniors and other beneficiaries have greater access to the drugs
they need.
HOME