Government action ‘an attack on physicians’
I have practiced family medicine in Nova Scotia for more than 35 years. Recently, I read with dismay the Health and Wellness Minister’s comments that the government has a “dispute with an organization, not with Nova Scotia’s physicians.”
For the last year, Minister Randy Delorey’s department has refused to honour the terms of the recently negotiated Master Agreement between the province and Doctors Nova Scotia (DNS).
The consequence of this action further erodes doctors’ trust in the intentions of his government to improve access to health care for all Nova Scotians.
The contingency fund that government has depleted was created from a combination of repurposed clinical income earned by Nova Scotia’s doctors and government funds to allow us to create a health, dental and parental leave plan that successive governments had refused to provide.
Additionally, the fund was used to pay for special projects intended to support the ability of Doctors Nova Scotia to improve care for Nova Scotians. It is not a surplus of taxpayers’ money that government can claw-back at their whim. That would be like a company only sending a paychecque to an employee once his/her personal bank account has been emptied.
I am reminded of the actions of the Savage Liberal government in the early 1990s, which arbitrarily and unilaterally took $10 million from physician payments because they felt health care was too expensive. Truro quickly lost five family practice physicians and several specialists, and health care here was set back by more than a decade.
Make no mistake. This action is an attack on physicians, not on an “organization,” and is one more assault on the ability of Nova Scotia to retain and recruit much-needed doctors.
Nova Scotia physicians are the lowest paid in the country, according to CIHI data released this week. We need a strong and vibrant organization to represent our interests and speak out when the Department of Health and Wellness and the Nova Scotia Health Authority act to diminish our ability to provide high-quality medical care to our patients.
Our government would prefer to see dissenting voices silenced. Don Pugsley, MD Truro