HALIFAX, N.S. — Our health care system may needing intensive care right now, but the prognosis isn’t as dire according to the people in the system. Doctors Nova Scotia President Dr. Leisha Hawker says it’s good to see the province making it a priority and making changes. Although some of the recent announcements by government for triaging emergency room patients has her concerned. She says the biggest issues throughout health care are human resource issues.
So if you have something that's urgent, shingles or bladder infection, you're getting strep throat, that doesn't really help you and you wind up in the emergency department. I work alongside dietitians, nurses, nurse practitioners, mental health workers and social workers, and we're all working to our full scope. That means when my patient comes to the clinic, they don't only see their family doctor, but they're seeing the right person at the right time and they get wrap around services.
LH: We have seen from other jurisdictions the benefit of utilizing physician extenders, whether it's physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists or advanced care paramedics. And the more we utilize everyone, so everybody is working to their top of their scope, the better access Nova Scotians will have to health care.
SM: I guess to carry that to another area of patient care. If you have a community hospital where there's an obstetrics unit yet no babies are being born there. The resources that are there or in place that are not necessarily being utilized to the full scope because of population, because of demographic. I'm wondering if that's a conversation that's happening.
And I know that does occur in some parts of our province currently. So we need to look at outside the box different ways that we can make sure that people are getting services close to home as best as possible, but also working in a way that it's efficient. It really comes down to recruitment of more nurses and other health care providers and retaining everyone that we do have and respecting our nurses and staff and making sure that they can achieve work life balance. Because without work life balance, we're going to have a really hard time recruiting others.
And we've also seen the government recently announce ten new residency positions for family medicine, for international graduates that have connections to Nova Scotia. I know one international graduate who's been trying to become a physician in Nova Scotia for about five years now, and I'm really hopeful that she gets one of those spots. But I know there's many, many international medical graduates and it's quite competitive.
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