In an open letter published on Sunday, the Minister of Health Christian Dubé defends his “Health Plan”, a transformation which “takes time” while many network indicators have been in the red for months.
“The solutions to improve the network have been known for a long time”, indicates the Minister in his letter, underlining in the same breath that the Health Plan was put in place “barely nine months” ago.
“Now is not the time to be discouraged,” he pleads.
Minister Dubé recalls recent initiatives, such as the opening of specialized nurse practitioner (SNP) clinics to unclog emergency rooms and the care of more patients by family physicians.
Pointing to the shortage of manpower, he adds that the government has “deployed accelerated training and offered scholarships to increase cohorts in the fields of health, in particular for nurses”.
He also highlights future projects, including the establishment of two private mini-hospitals “to relieve emergency room congestion and provide a better patient experience”. A project that will be led by MP Youri Chassin, former director of research at the Montreal Economic Institute, whose candidacy was criticized in 2018, in particular because of his positions on the privatization of the health system.
Minister Dubé’s exit comes a little over a month after the announcement of the creation of a crisis unit to develop solutions to the recurring overflows of emergencies in Greater Montreal.
Since then, the emergency room has remained in the red, occupied in particular by many patients struggling with respiratory viruses. If the latter have worsened the portrait in recent weeks, the situation of hospitals in the province has been described as critical for months.
But “it is not by highlighting what is wrong that we are going to make our network attractive”, pleads the minister in his letter, published on social networks. “Of course, there are things that are not going so well, that’s for sure and I recognize that. But we can’t always talk only about what’s going wrong, we help to discourage those we need, ”he adds.