(Quebec) We have rarely seen that when a bill is tabled in the National Assembly.
There was such a demand to download the Dubé reform that the National Assembly website crashed!
“A server problem is preventing the National Assembly website from displaying. Please try to view it again later. »
The problem was corrected before we had to ask Éric Caire why “SAAQclic” not…
This shows how eagerly awaited the bill “aimed at making the health and social services system more efficient”.
Critics, they were not long in coming. The Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, had barely opened his mouth to present his bill at a press conference when the journalists’ cell phone vibrated: the Federation of Medical Specialists of Quebec (FMSQ) sends its reaction! The government’s intention to impose new requirements on them does not pass. “A counter-productive method” and “an attitude of confrontation”, accuses the union of specialists. There will be a whole showdown.
We forget, but this is not the first time that Christian Dubé has faced the FMSQ.
When he was President of the Treasury Board at the start of the CAQ’s first term, he concluded an agreement with her that was criticized in many respects: the government did not reduce the remuneration of medical specialists by $ 1 billion per year as promised. . Instead, we committed to saving $1.6 billion over four years by creating an Institute for the Appropriateness of Medical Procedures. In particular, medical specialists have been asked to no longer perform acts deemed unnecessary. You read correctly.
The president of the FMSQ at the time, the DD Diane Francœur was jubilant: “It’s the happiest day of my life! “, she launched to colleagues in a union meeting at the Quebec City Convention Center in December 2019 when the ink of the agreement was not yet dry. It was an important victory for the specialists in the context where the threat of the government to make cuts in remuneration was great; it was an election promise, after all!
Is Christian Dubé ready to have his moment of truth with the FMSQ? While saying he has an attitude of “collaboration”, he expressed his firm intention not to give in: doctors will have to accept new constraints. “The principle, it is very clear, it is in the law: it will take AMP” from specialists – as is already the case for family doctors. AMPs are the “specific medical activities” that will be imposed on these physicians – participating in on-call duty at the hospital, offering working hours in unfavorable shifts, being available in the emergency room, responding more effectively to consultation requests made by family doctors, for example.
The exit of the College of Physicians in favor of greater “social responsibility” of the medical community in order to ensure better access to care throughout the territory allows the Minister to believe that he will have an important ally in the battle come.
The government is brandishing the stick, but will it hold out the carrot – a bonus in remuneration – to have its new constraints accepted?
Christian Dubé pointed out that the compensation package for the 11,000 medical specialists negotiated with the FMSQ and included in the budget – approximately $5 billion – is not spent in full each year for all sorts of reasons. There is apparently money available on the table…
Christian Dubé greatly praises the “local management” advocated in his reform, but the creation of Santé Québec is also an operation of centralization. A single employer and only four union certification units (instead of a hundred). This means one union for each of the four job categories in the entire network (nurses, support staff, administrative staff and technician-professionals). Hello the atmosphere at the common front of the trade union centers! The Legault government makes him a leg when we negotiate the renewal of collective agreements.
“Hello, dear members of the union yoke! quipped CSN President Caroline Senneville when she joined other union representatives who had come to listen to Minister Dubé in an auditorium in Complex G. The upcoming period of raiding will inevitably provoke a fratricidal war. We have already seen this under the Charest and Couillard governments – casually, the CSN lost approximately 25,000 members to the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) and the Fédération Quebec Interprofessional Health Organization (FIQ) in 2017.
It will be a stir among union delegates who will ask themselves questions about their fate. It is anticipated that the union release industry will be shaken. That’s more than 1 million hours per year across the entire network, for which the bill amounts to $34 million.
Nobody will mourn the disappearance of the horrible acronyms that are CISSS and CIUSSS – but we won’t escape it, because new ones are appearing! Their boards of directors will be replaced by establishment councils where staff members – both nurses and doctors, for that matter – will now have no representative. Ditto for the board of directors of Santé Québec.
And the “users” in all this? The Provincial Regrouping of Users’ Committees is concerned that their voice is losing its importance despite Christian Dubé’s speech on this subject. To be continued.
The opposition parties accuse the minister of wanting to rid himself of responsibility with the creation of Santé Québec. When asked who, with his reform, was going to have to answer questions about a problem of organization of work in a hospital or a problem in access to care for patients, Christian Dubé replied: “Listen, if the response is not satisfactory from the side of the CEO of Santé Québec, I’m sure I’m going to hear about it, either from you or from someone else. The first answer, for me, is the CEO, who takes care of providing the quality of services we want. »
For Christian Dubé, the success of his reform can be measured from his famous dashboard on the performance of the network, which shows in particular the state of the waiting lists. “All our indicators are clearly indicated, we are transparent. Take them one by one. »
Noted. We will know how to check if Minister Dubé has, like the website of the National Assembly, crashed.