NORTHAM
Ellerslie resident Doreen Wooder has let Health and Wellness minister Robert Mitchell know she is not satisfied with the state of health care in the Tyne Valley region.
Wooder spoke out during the annual meeting of the Stewart Memorial Hospital Foundation in Northam where Mitchell was guest speaker.
The former Stewart Memorial Hospital now functions as a manor while awaiting decommissioning once a new manor opens this fall.
“It’s us, here, who had a hospital closed, that felt very bitter about it, who were told, ‘this is all going to be fixed by the clinic,’” Wooder reviewed.
“Guess what? (The clinic’s) still not working to its potential. It needs a change of hours; it needs a staff. It needs to be a staff that stays there, not just comes for a few weeks and leaves,” she continued.
As Mitchell started to explain that staff is working diligently on recruitment and retention, Wooder interjected, “They’ve been doing that for two years.”
The minister acknowledged that and pointed out all other jurisdictions are working on recruitment and retention, too. He also acknowledged a reliance on locums but pointed out, “If we can get locums to come in to help out, we will never turn them down.”
Mitchell said he is reaching out to physicians and asking them to take on larger panel sizes as a means of reducing the number of people on the patient registry, and he added staff are working with medical students from the province, providing them with incentives and encouragement in hopes they will come back home to practice.
“It’s not unique to here,” Mitchell said of the doctor shortage, “but it is obviously more concerning to you, what’s going on here, and I can appreciate that.”
Some frustrations were expressed during the meeting about Dr. Roy Montgomery being called away from his Tyne Valley practice to assist with coverage at Western Hospital in Alberton. Mitchell said Montgomery played a key role in helping to keep Western functioning. “Otherwise, what would we do there?” he asked.
Mitchell suggested the Tyne Valley clinic is one of the best on the Island. “If I’m a doctor walking in there, my hand is up: ‘This is a beautiful facility; I’ll come here,’” he said. He expressed hope upcoming site visits will be met with that sort of response.
“So, we’re working on the issue,” Mitchell addressed Wooder. “I hope that I can come up here next year and you and I will say, ‘you did good,’ and I’d be happy with that.”
“I’d be thrilled,” Wooder replied.
Residents also raised concern about having Tyne Valley lumped in with the West Prince physician complement. Transportation, Infrastructure and Energy Minister Paula Biggar whose riding takes in many of the communities that were part of the Stewart Memorial Hospital catchment area, said most people in the region identify more with East Prince than with West Prince for health care.
