New Brunswick Medical Society seeks more funding for province’s health-care system

The New Brunswick Medical Society is calling on the province to put more money into its health-care system.

Paula Keating, the society’s president, has been a family physician for over 30 years and said many health-care workers are burned out.

“We’re being asked to do more and more with less and less every day. We’re being asked to take on more patients when people are at their max. It’s unsustainable,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.

“This is probably the worst I’ve seen it (…) of people expressing dissatisfaction, wanting to retire early, choose alternative pathways and wanting to leave medicine altogether.”

Tom Bateman, a political science professor at Saint Thomas University, said health care would likely be a top-of-mind issue for voters in a possible provincial election.

“It will be more important now because the difficulties are very, very apparent to just about everybody. … It’s more acute now than ever,” he said, noting for example the growing wait list for primary care physicians and long emergency room wait times.

Claire Johnson, a professor in health-care management at the Université de Moncton, said the government should create teams-based primary care in order to ensure more timely access.

“If we’ve got this huge surplus, there are creative things that we could do,” she said, referring to the province’s $1 billion surplus from 2022.

Johnson said creating new programs like NB Health Link, a program run by Medavie for those without a family doctor to access primary care, had created a “patchwork” of health-care initiatives rather than an integrated plan.

“There certainly are many areas of need,” Keating said.

“We have seniors living in hospitals because there’s not enough care to help them stay home longer or nursing home beds,” she said.

“We need more investment in everything. Some of our hospital equipment is outdated. We need more investment in residency training, we need more investment in frontline healthcare workers.”

Bateman said the pressures of inflation and the rising cost of living could also be an important factor in a potential provincial election.

“People are being priced right out of the housing market and it’s even hard to rent, so health care will be big. But it’s a crowded agenda at the top,” Bateman said.

“Regardless of whether there’s an election call or not,” Keating said, “right now, it’s time to call attention to these matters.”