NSHA staff respond to local health-care concerns

The Digby General Hospital site manager admits challenges exist. However, his primary concern is recruitment – and he’s worried about how negative media could damage those efforts.

“There is a risk of becoming blind to the reality of what we have if you only choose to focus on the negative,” Hubert d’Entremont says. “That goes the same if we only focus on the positive. So from a health authority point of view, yes, we are saying there are some positives happening here. However, we are very, very aware of the other requirements that are not so positive.

“So yes, it’s important to remind the public progress is being made. Are we there? No. We clearly recognize that. We recognize the need for additional health resources, but also it’s important to put into perspective that we have good people here who are working hard and that we want more good people to join us.”

D’Entremont says there is a health-care professional recruiter assigned to the Digby area. However, looking at the NSHA website, that recruiter is also assigned to half the province. What both d’Entremont and Fraser Mooney, public engagement and communications officer for Digby, Shelburne and Yarmouth for the Nova Scotia Health Authority, readily admitted is that communications with the public is an area of focus for improvement.

“Through the restructuring of the former health authority into the NSHA, there have been some things that have been lost and perhaps those include some of our connections with our local communities and with our municipal governments,” Mooney says.

Mooney describes the stakeholder group that meets regularly and while no members of the public are part of that group, Mooney says they are represented through their elected officials.

The stakeholder group includes Digby Mayor Ben Cleveland, Municipal Warden Jimmy MacAlpine, MLA Gordon Wilson, a representative from both Weymouth and Bear River, several NSHA staff and the chair of the Digby and Area Health Services Charitable Foundation, Neil Nichols.

“What we’ve found with that group is that it’s been quite positive in sharing information and, quite frankly, we’re hearing from our stakeholders what some of the concerns are in the community,” Mooney says, adding that NSHA is now taking that Digby-based stakeholder meeting model into other areas, including, as of last week, Shelburne.

Mooney says they’re also now more willing to discuss the challenges they’re facing with the massive transition from regional health authorities to a provincial one and the more specific challenges they’re facing in Digby.

“I think we need to be realistic about the challenges we have,” Mooney says. “And we have challenges – challenges in staffing, physician recruitment, recruitment of others as well – and that creates problems with accessing services. However, I think we also want to help people understand that there are a lot things happening … people are still seeing the challenges from the last number of years, but they also need to know that is all stuff that we’re working on.”

D’Entremont says he is con- cerned about the negative messages having the potential to harm the recruitment efforts.

“If the overall message is, throughout the community, throughout the province, throughout the country, with this current world of communications, that everything is bad here in Digby, then we will have a major challenge in recruiting anybody to come here, and this has been expressed by our municipal leaders as well,” he says. “Are we denying that we have a lack of resources, not at all. But if the daily grind is negative, our challenge at attracting someone from the outside is going to be monumental.

“The simple fact that we’re recruiting means we need help, but let’s acknowledge that we are making progress . . . basically, since September, we are in a better place. Are we in a great place? Well, we have some areas we are still actively working on, but one of our biggest challenges is that we are swimming against a huge, huge current of negativity.”

The issue, both men say, is in attracting health-care professionals to rural Canada, not just specifically to Digby.

“That is a challenge of rural Nova Scotia, and rural Canada,” Mooney says.

D’Entremont says the issues go beyond the rural nature of the community, however, they come back to the workload that individual doctors have attempted to take on in the past.

“The amount of work for an individual has been a factor identified by previous providers, who, on their departure, have said, ‘This is a beautiful place, (but) the challenge to have a work-life balance is significant,’ and therefore they have taken the opportunity to relocate to an area that offered something different.”

Mooney says he’s excited about the new collaborative team that is already in place and how it addresses that piece of the puzzle.

“Dr. David LaPierre has this enthusiastic energy,” Mooney says. “In the short time he’s been here ... he brings energy and enthusiasm to engaging, not just the members of the team, but he’s also looking to engage the community. I’m really enjoying working with the members of this team, it’s quite a refreshing change.”

Mooney also says there are no barriers in place to recruiting a doctor for Weymouth.

“We took a real hard look at how we were going to best provide service to the community of Weymouth and the people in the area, knowing the difficulties we’ve had in recruiting a single, sole practice doctor, so there was talk about including the Weymouth area as part of the collaborative team that’s being created here in Digby.”

However, Mooney says that after consultations, that idea evolved into the removal of restrictions on a solo practice physician who could choose to operate within the new collaborative practice if so desired. Mooney says that active doctor recruitment for Weymouth is ongoing and that the recruiter looking after the Digby area has also met with Weymouth-based stakeholders.

“We’ve had to look at what we can do differently,” says Mooney. “Just the fact that this team is working together as a collaborative team, that’s a relatively new concept for Nova Scotia … to have that kind of collegiality is really attractive for providers.”