N.L. medical officials left with questions about plans to bring health authorities together
The devil is in the details, says NLMA president
Officials within Newfoundland and Labrador's health-care and academic communities say consolidating the province's four regional health authorities into one has potential — but there are still questions.
The plan to bring the health authorities together was announced in the 2022 provincial budget, a plan that Finance Minister Siobhan Coady said will streamline processes and improve things like decision-making and data management.
The idea was also brought forward in the report from the premier's economic recovery team in 2021.
Yvette Coffey, president of the province's registered nurses' union, said she was happy to see additional spending in the province's health-care budget but her members will have concerns about moving to a single health authority.
"Our members will have a lot of questions around that, what that means for them. Will there be job losses?" Coffey told CBC News on Friday.
"We would hope that there would be a transition and a discussion with stakeholders … to ensure that there is a workers' lens put on any decisions that are made."
The provincial government says it's too early to tell if the move to one health authority will result in job losses.
MUN medical faculties will also group up
Coady also announced Thursday the provincial government will bring post-secondary medical programs, including pharmacy and nursing, under one provincewide faculty of health — something that caught Memorial University president Vianne Timmons off guard.
"If there were conversations, they weren't with me, which is very possible because we're a big, comprehensive university," Timmons said Friday.
Timmons's thought was correct, according to a statement from the Department of Education. The department said budget officials made courtesy calls to various members of Memorial's executive, including the academic vice-president and the dean of the faculty of medicine.
Timmons said conversations with faculty deans and the school's board of regents will begin to see if the provincial government's vision can be a reality, but added partnering with the government is important.
"I definitely see the benefits, but there are challenges too," she said.
"For example, each discipline, people are attached to their discipline. They're very focused, they train within their discipline. So we want to make sure that we keep the capacity to make sure our nursing students get trained in the nursing profession … same for pharmacy students."
Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association president Dr. Susan MacDonald said she's cautiously optimistic about the idea but the devil is in the details.
"I trained in a system where all those schools were under the faculty of health sciences, and it seemed to work relatively well, but I was a student so what did I know?" she said Thursday.
"I don't know how that's going to play out. And I'd like to see a lot more details about that. I think anything where students from a variety of faculties work together and train together and learn together, because they're going to practise together, there's some benefits for that."
Education Minister Tom Osborne said Thursday he believes progress on amalgamating the faculties could be made this year or next, but Timmons wouldn't comment on a timeline.
Coffey hopes to learn how other health-care programs, like the nursing programs at the College of the North Atlantic, fit into the picture but said she can see the benefits of a collaborative approach.
"We're cautiously optimistic that this will create more of a team-based approach to health care by having them all under the one heading, the one school. And that each groups will not be in silos anymore, but trained in a team-based approach, which is what we are aiming for when we talk about primary health-care models."
With files from Henrike Wilhelm