Health P.E.I suffering from disorganization

Health P.E.I. is in disarray. In six years it’s had four CEOs and the QEH has had three medical directors. It’s outrageous, simply outrageous.

HPEI’s organizational leadership is flailing in the wind and with regard to achieving excellence in health care - it is directionless. Lack of front-line resources continues to be a longstanding problem for which patients suffer. Since beginning our advocacy, in the Souris Community Hospital Region there has been an improvement in ambulance response to acceptable standards, a renovation of the dialysis centre and maintenance of hospital acute bed status.

These issues do not illustrate an informed position or responsiveness from management. It took marches on the legislature against a protesting government to achieve these basic services. These improvements illustrate the sense of the community and the wrongheadedness of centralized unconnected management.

Patient registry numbers are so purposefully deceitful that anyone citing them from minister to manager should be dismissed for willfully misleading the public. Souris Community Hospital Region is continually and purposefully under-resourced for doctors. To help compensate, two nurse practitioners were hired as a valuable part of health care access, especially when the alternative is no care at all. In August HPEI decided to not renew the contract for one of the nurses.

Once again, HPEI leaves elderly sick people in a vulnerable and unsupported position just because they are elderly, sick, rural and of limited use to the value of the establishment.

The worst problem in HealthPEI and the Department of Health is that upper and middle managers who have a duty to ensure people have health access don’t care enough about people who don’t have access to basic health care. HPEI recruitment and managerial personnel have told us that they will only agree to terms that suit their system.

The establishment is primarily looking after the establishment. The needs of the needy don’t adequately register with HPEI leaders and managers; if they did, the problem would get fixed. Health P.E.I. doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a problem with leadership, management, spending and priorities.

Both the federal and provincial government have a values problem whereby universal access to abortion is of high value and universal access to basic health care is not a value, especially if you are elderly, sick and rural. There is nothing gentle, mighty or sunny about lack of access to basic health care for vulnerable, sick people in need – these are not the angels of our better nature.

Health P.E.I. is irreversibly broken and needs to be reconfigured. The basic steps to reconfiguration are to temporarily centralize decisionmaking back to the Department of Health, whom we are told is making many of the decisions anyway.

Secondly, establish two divisions of hospitals; full service hospitals in Charlottetown and Summerside, and community hospitals in Souris, Montague, O’Leary and Alberton. Thirdly, assign budgets and elected boards to each hospital according to their category and the size of their region they serve. We can do better.

Alan E. MacPhee,

Chairman of Islandwide Hospital Access

Souris, P.E.I.