Sackville-Memramcook-Tantramar Rural Health Action Group Co-chair John Higham says it’s now a matter of when, not if, emergency services will resume at Sackville Memorial Hospital in New Brunswick.
The community group has been collaborating with Horizon Health Network to aid recruitment efforts in order to restore the 24-7 emergency services it lost in June 2021.
“When the community is comfortable that this is long-term now, then (the Rural Health Action Group and Horizon are) talking about what types of clinics are going to go in there. We’re talking about what types of (operating room) activities are going to be in there…”
The hospital is important to Sackville residents like Ray Anderson.
“It’s important for everyone. This is a big district and no one realises it. We’re kinda tucked away in the southeast corner but there’s a lot of villages, a community, a rural population and we need this here big time,” he said Tuesday.
The hospital is only open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, and frequently closes on weekends due to lack of staff.
According to a Horizon press release issued on Monday, the group has helped recruit five registered nurses and five nurse practitioners who have been working in the emergency department over the past year.
Higham said he thinks the community group’s efforts to rehabilitate the hospital’s image among health-care workers has made a difference.
“I think that what happened is, at least on the nurses’ side, they’ve seen ‘this is a place I want to work’ and they’ve come. Now we have to go to physicians and make our pitches to them,” he said.
“We have come a long way since June 2021,” former Sackville mayor Shawn Mesheau told Global News.
“In order for us to move forward communities need to be part of the solution and this is what is happening here,” he said.
Two more registered nurses and four more emergency room doctors are required before full-time emergency services can be restored, according to Horizon.
Memramcook-Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton is pleased the community group has been effective but says the province still has an important role to play.
“It’s ultimately the job of Horizon to do the recruitment in collaboration and the funding from the government needs to be there, and the resources,” she said in an interview on Tuesday.
A representative from the Department of Health told Global News that an ER physician could receive up to $100,000 in recruitment incentives if they commit to working in a rural hospital for at least four years.
That’s a $20,000 increase from the 2021-2022 budget.
Mitton also expressed concern over the possible effects of the premier’s wiping of both Vitalité and Horizon’s boards that occurred in July.
“We still don’t have a governance structure in place, so there are a lot of questions and a lot of that is up in the air,” she said.
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