(Montreal) Québec solidaire proposes to strengthen the Info-Santé 8-1-1 service to make it a real triage, with nurses who have access to patient health records and who can make appointments. And their destination will often be CSLCs boosted by the hiring of 5,000 new employees, a promise that will cost 500 million per year.
Posted at 11:18 a.m.
Updated at 12:51 p.m.
“We need to broaden the front door of our public health system. We must focus on care from home, ”launched the parliamentary leader of Québec solidaire Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois at a press briefing Monday in a Montreal park.
Mr. Nadeau-Dubois believes that too often, the current gateway to the health network is hospital emergency rooms. “With Québec solidaire, it will become the CSLCs,” he said. The CLSCs “are already everywhere in the territory and already offer local services”, affirms Mr. Nadeau, but they are “underused since their creation”. He believes he can repatriate female health workers who have fled the public network because of poor working conditions since he also promises to abolish compulsory overtime.
The party’s goal is to provide accessible home care from the 8-1-1 number. The nurse at the telephone “triage” would have access to the patient file remotely, and could then make appointments to the patients, and direct them to the appropriate services: clinics, pharmacies or the emergency room of a hospital, but especially the CLSCs. Québec solidaire also promises to hire more nurses to reduce telephone waiting times.
Too focused on doctors
“Right now people know what 8-1-1 is, first contact. […] But it’s not really support, we’re going to change that, ”explained Mr. Nadeau-Dubois. If Québec solidaire is elected, this service would become a “universal gateway to access our entire public health system,” he explained.
Québec solidaire also promises to “decompartmentalise” the medical professions.
The leader of Québec solidaire made the announcement at Beaubien Park, in the riding of Outremont, under a blazing sun, with his health candidates, in particular doctors Isabelle Leblanc, Yv Bonnier-Viger and Mélissa Généreux.
Isabelle Leblanc, who presents herself in Mont-Royal–Outremont, has worked for 15 years in the family medicine group in St-Mary. “We really relied too much on doctors as the focal point of the system, while working on the front line is a team sport,” she said. She also believes that an improved 8-1-1 service will relieve emergency room congestion.
She cites as an example the clinics set up during the pandemic for patients who had symptoms related to COVID-19. A simple phone call made it possible to have an appointment.
It remains to be seen how this service could integrate — or compete — with the front-line access counter set up by the Coalition avenir Québec.
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, he believes that they will complement each other. He believes that a blind spot of this counter is that it cannot be used by people who already have a family doctor. But, he says, parents who have a child with an ear infection in the evening often end up in the water even though they have one.