Magazine article very disappointing, says doctor

Proposed community health centres are little more than ‘family doctor offices’

As a long-time supporter of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, I was very disappointed by the article entitled “Closing rural N.S. hospital a little pain for longterm gain” which appeared in the summer edition of the Canadian Taxpayer.

It is true that 20 years ago these hospitals (in North Sydney and New Waterford) were underutilized prior to the construction of the Cape Breton Regional Hospital, which was opened in the early 1990s.

I was on the committee to design the Regional during the 1980s. After much arguing and compromises, and a million or two in design costs, a design was sent to the Department of Health which would have served the needs of Cape Breton very well. After all that work, which for many of us was unpaid, that design was rejected as “too expensive” and the hospital was built to a different plan which had less usable space than the previous Sydney City and St. Rita hospitals in Sydney.

Even after considerable expensive renovations, the Cape Breton Regional Hospital has been woefully inadequate in meeting Cape Breton’s needs.

Currently, the Regional Hospital consists of three roughly equal parts:

1. massive hallways consisting of almost unusable space

2. administrative offices

3. patient care areas Because of that, many services which should have been provided in the Regional Hospital have been transferred to outlying hospitals such as the Northside General Hospital and the New Waterford Consolidated Hospital. Both hospitals are now fully utilized. The pain clinic in the Northside General, where I work, has about 6,500 outpatient visits per year and serves patients from all over Cape Breton as well as a significant number of mainland patients as well as some from New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Two single-floor wings of the hospital provide inpatient care and the beds are usually full. Two floors provide long-term care. The operating room does mostly outpatient surgery and other services such as geriatric psychiatry are also provided in this institution. The ER is beautifully equipped, but underutilized due to a lack of doctors to operate it. Instead, patients must take a 30-minute drive to the Regional Hospital where they often wait more than eight hours to be seen.

The lack of doctors in the Northside stems from two causes:

1. Restriction of doctors the Department of Health allows to practice in Cape Breton.

2. Lower pay for working in the Northside General as opposed to the Regional.

Both of these problems were created by the government.

The current plan, which caused so much outrage in Cape Breton, was presented to us by the premier without any local consultation. It proposes tearing down two large well-built hospitals, mostly paid for by local citizens, which, contrary to what the Department of Health may say, are fully utilized and replacing them with two tiny “community health centres” which basically amount to family doctor offices.

In exchange, there will be another attempt to make the government-designed Regional Hospital workable. This may be good for the construction industry, but won’t do much for health care in Cape Breton.

The article pointed out, for the wrong reason, that the population in Cape Breton is aging. Unfortunately, an aging population requires more health care not less, and the premier’s plan will not make that possible.

One of my patients obtained two interesting documents through the Freedom of information act. The first is a tender for the new community health centre of about 6,800 square feet which is to replace the Northside General Hospital. The Northside General has a floor area in the vicinity of 150,000 square feet, The second is a list of the number of bureaucrats working for the Nova Scotia Health Authority who earn more than $100,000 per year. About 50 names on that list are people doing clinical work.

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