Robert Libman: Quebec's health-care reform already exhibiting cracks

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Consultations and public hearings to solicit enter on Quebec’s sweeping health-care reform solely received underway on Wednesday, however that didn’t cease the Nationwide Meeting this week from unanimously adopting Invoice 10, which limits using personal health-care companies and goals to ban them by December 2024.

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Quebec calls on these exterior placement companies to supply personnel to fill in staffing gaps at health-care establishments and seniors’ residences, for instance. Nevertheless, the issue is that these companies — by providing larger salaries and higher flexibility — siphon out of the general public system hundreds of nurses and professionals who could also be fed up with their working circumstances or pressured time beyond regulation. Well being Minister Christian Dubé mentioned about 30,000 health-care staff go away the general public community yearly.

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When the companies place these professionals into establishments, it creates inequity and resentment as they work alongside public staff who earn much less and infrequently work worse shifts. This contracting out of unbiased staff additionally prices the general public community far more — virtually $1 billion in 2022, a 380-per-cent enhance over the previous six years, in response to the Well being Division. Moreover, these companies get a giant lower on every worker by charging extra per worker than what they pay them. It’s an unfair scenario that must be reined in.

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Nevertheless, whereas laws is critical, Invoice 10 looks like one other instance of the Coalition Avenir Québec authorities utilizing punitive measures to resolve an issue as a substitute of taking a extra complete strategy that positively incentivizes professionals to stay within the public well being system.

By forcing these companies to shut, the federal government hopes to attract all these contract staff again into the general public system. That’s unlikely to materialize if the salaries and dealing circumstances that led many to go away within the first place stay. Many will probably go away Quebec or the career completely. Others will search to work in personal clinics or docs’ places of work, creating much more of a vacuum and leaving establishments scrambling with no alternate options.

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Quebec nurses are already the bottom paid in Canada. To make issues worse, final December the CAQ authorities applied a measure penalizing new nurses with college levels by unceremoniously shifting them into the bottom entry-pay echelon.

Dubé mentioned Invoice 10 “provides us time to make a hyperlink with negotiations on collective agreements, that are occurring in parallel.” The exterior companies in some methods give some negotiating energy to the nurses’ union, which might level to them as proof that hundreds are leaving the general public system over insufficient wages and dealing circumstances. Is focusing on the companies throughout negotiations partly a calculated ploy by the well being minister to chop the legs from beneath the nurses’ union? 

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Nurses be a part of the career as a result of they need to nurse folks again to higher well being. When their working circumstances compromise their very own well being and well-being, they can’t assist others. No well being reform can succeed with out efficient nursing assets and health-care professionals. They should be drawn to the career willingly and work in an surroundings that’s bearable.

In tandem, the federal government should more and more facilitate entry and coaching by bolstering instructional establishments that feed these professions. It can’t be repeated typically sufficient how ludicrous was the choice by the CAQ authorities to cancel the Dawson Faculty enlargement for a brand new pavilion for college kids in health-care applications, together with nurses and technicians.

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The Nationwide Meeting is contemplating mountain climbing MNA base salaries by 30 per cent. It’s far more pressing for the federal government to finalize negotiations to enhance the salaries and dealing circumstances of nurses. This should go hand in hand with Invoice 10; in any other case, the invoice’s goal will fail miserably by breeding resentment and deepening the labour disaster within the well being system even additional.

Robert Libman is an architect and constructing planning guide who has served as Equality Social gathering chief and MNA, as mayor of Côte-St-Luc and as a member of the Montreal govt committee. He was a Conservative candidate within the 2015 federal election. twitter.com/robertlibman