Nova Scotia Health will be calling people over the next several weeks to verify that they’re still looking for a primary care provider. (Pixabay)

If you’re one of the 1,100 people in Queens County still looking for a primary care provider, you may be getting a call from Nova Scotia Health.

Officials will be phoning people on the need-a-family-practice registry over the next several weeks to confirm whether they’re still looking for a doctor or nurse practitioner.

According to a release from Nova Scotia Health, people will be called from either a blocked number, one they don’t recognize or an unknown name and number.

Staff won’t ask you to provide any personal information besides the last four digits of your Nova Scotia health card and your birth date.

They will also ask for confirmation of your phone number and physical and email addresses.

According to the news release, this is so that the department can contact people when a doctor or nurse practitioner is available to take new patients.

Health staff will also be calling people who added their name to the list because their provider told them they’d be retiring. This is to confirm whether their doctor retired.

The registry hasn’t been updated since June 1. According to CBC News, opposition politicians this week accused the government of withholding up-to-date numbers on how many people still need a doctor or nurse practitioner.

As of June 1, 160,234 Nova Scotians were still on the registry. About 10 per cent of Queens County residents are still looking for a primary care provider. That compares to about 23 per cent of the population in the Bridgewater area.

QCCR will have an interview on Friday with Noella Whalen, the senior director of the primary care and chronic disease management network with Nova Scotia Health. Whalen is leading the project.

Health Minister Michelle Thompson (middle) addresses residents of Queens Feb 17, 2023. Photo Ed Halverson

People from across Queens gathered at the Best Western in Liverpool Friday to share their concerns about the health care system and hear what the province is doing to fix it.

Minister of Health and Wellness Michelle Thompson and representatives from across the health authority spent just over an hour answering questions from the public.

People wanted to know what’s being done to recruit more primary caregivers, how to reduce wait times, and if there are enough paramedics to answer their call in an emergency.

Minister Thompson says she welcomes the opportunity to speak directly to Nova Scotians about steps government is taking to tackle the healthcare crisis.

“Sometimes it’s hard for us to get our message out,” said Thompson. “It’s hard to get all of this information out past media cycle, we often live in soundbites and so to sit in community and hear directly and speak directly for two hours, I think is really meaningful for people.”

The minister went into detail about plans to recruit doctors from abroad and entice retired physicians back to practice.

Residents pose questions to Nova Scotia Health officials at the Queens Community Health Conversation on Feb 17 2023. Photo Ed Halverson

But she made it clear that across North America, systems are moving away from patients having a single-family doctor and moving to a collaborative team approach.

Thompson says that care team could consist of a nurse practitioner, a physiotherapist, a dietician, a pharmacist, or any other combination of healthcare professionals.

The point would be for your file to be with a clinic and when you sought treatment you would be triaged and directed to the appropriate caregiver.

This method would also allow your health record to stay within a practice so even if one of the members left, your record would be accessible, and you could still receive care.

Throughout the question-and-answer period the health minister hinted at new legislation that would be introduced during the upcoming sitting of the Legislature to remove obstacles from healthcare workers.

“Everything is focused right now on healthcare,” said Thompson. “There are barriers that sometimes we don’t always see, and we want to remove those.”

When pressed on which barriers her department would like to remove Thompson said, “How do we use people to the fullness of their scope? How do we ensure that there’s mobility so people can move into the province easily and making sure that we’ve modernized those systems.”

Thompson says how government will meet those goals will be revealed when the Legislature reconvenes March 21.

E-mail: edhalversonnews@gmail.com
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Tim Houston addresses reporters following cabinet meeting June 16 2022. Photo: screen grab from Zoom

Nova Scotia’s premier says timelines to address healthcare are coming soon.

The PC government released their Action for Health plan in April which identified core issues and offered six broad solutions for the provincial healthcare system.

Opposition members have been critical of the plan for not providing timelines to go along with the solutions.

Following a cabinet meeting Thursday, Tim Houston told reporters they’re still working on it.

“We did commit to add some dates and some benchmarks and that work is ongoing,” said Houston. “I think the commitment was Nova Scotians would start to see that heading into early summer, which we’re at now and I suspect that those things are coming soon.”

Tim Houston campaigned and won the August 2021 provincial election on a promise to fix healthcare.

His government inherited a system with tens of thousands of Nova Scotians on a family doctor waitlist, ambulances lined up and waiting hours to offload patients at hospitals, emergency rooms closed for staffing shortages, long backlogs of people waiting for surgeries and a laundry of other issues.

Houston admits there is a lot of work to do but some of the changes are already having a positive impact.

“There’s lots of anecdotal stories about how difficult things are in the healthcare system. There’s also lots of anecdotal stories about how things are improving. I’ve certainly heard from paramedics who will tell me, at the end of a day I was able to do this many more calls because I didn’t have to do these transfers,” said Houston. “Now they’ll be saying, I was able to do this many more calls because I was able to offload my patient. So, there’s a lot of positive anecdotal stories as well.”

The premier was referring to the new direct to triage policy that came into effect June 1 allowing paramedics to leave low risk patients in the care of waiting room staff instead of staying with them until they are seen by a doctor.

The PCs also made permanent a pilot project launched under the previous government which created a fleet of vehicles dedicated to patient transfers.

Houston says those are a couple of examples of changes that are improving healthcare for Nova Scotians and there are more to come.

“I would say to Nova Scotians that they should know, number one, that this is our number one focus as a government,” said Houston. “They should see that commitment from the amount of changes we’ve made which have come from healthcare workers. They should see that commitment in the plan that’s been put forward before them and look, they’ll start to see that in their communities, and some of that is happening already.”

Reported by Ed Halverson 
E-mail: edhalversonnews@gmail.com
Twitter: @edwardhalverson

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