Christian Dubé finally presented, on Wednesday, a voluminous bill aimed at creating the Santé Québec agency, a new state corporation supposed to make the health system more efficient and which will have the power to modify the seniority rules of the staff.
Bill 15, which contains more than 1,000 articles spread over 308 pages, recognizes the “right” of “everyone” to receive adequate and safe health services.
It provides for the transfer of numerous responsibilities from the Minister of Health to the new agency, which will have the status of a Crown corporation.
Santé Québec will also have the power to merge union certifications. This will ensure that the powers of local nurses’ unions are reduced, as François Legault said on Tuesday. Concretely, this will mean that a nurse will be able to keep her seniority if she changes region as her place of practice.
Medical specialists, for their part, inherit new responsibilities to better meet the needs of each region. New territorial departments of specialized medicine will have the task of supervising them.
The Minister is also creating a series of new director positions to manage the new system in the agency: medical director, medical directors of family and specialized medicine, director of nursing, director of social services, etc.
The ministry split in two
This piece of legislation is one of the pillars of the Health Plan presented by the Minister on this date last year. This reform, spread over three years, aims, according to the Minister, to make the network “more human and more efficient”.
It also defines the contours of the agency that the government wishes to create, following the example of Ontario. Called “Santé Québec”, it would be created by splitting the ministry into two parts. The latter would reserve the main orientations and the agency would be responsible for the daily performance of the network.
Further details will follow.