By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
Hot on the heels of yet another emergency department closure at the South Okanagan General Hospital (SOGH) just over a week ago and the eleventh this year, Boundary-Similkameen BC United MLA candidate, Ron Hovanes, is calling on the NDP to take immediate action.
“You don’t need a $7.5 million study to tell you that firing our health care workers for being unvaccinated, causing them to move out-of-province or retire, is one of the causes of the shortages in our hospital. Since the ‘stabilization program’ was announced, we have still seen eleven closures this year.” said Hovanes.
BC United leader Kevin Falcon was recently in Oliver for a healthcare roundtable and sat down with the Times Chronicle to talk about his party’s platform.
“We talked about that specific issue [SOGH emergency closures], but also the broader issue of the healthcare crisis that we’re facing right now,” he said.
Hovanes noted that there have been 44 closures at SOGH since the beginning of 2023. “It’s huge,” he said citing the example of heart and stroke victims, “they have that golden hour of care of as critical for them to get stabilized.” And with closures at SOGH, it means almost an hour to get to Pentiction. And then there is the population that doubles or triples in the summertime, Hovanes added.
And while it’s one thing to stand on the sidelines and point out the inadequacies, it’s quite another to have a viable solution. Falcon acknowledges this is the million-dollar question – how to fix the problem?
But before getting to the heart of that question he references the numbers. “We’re now in the midst of this crisis, we’ve got one in five British Columbians that don’t have access to a family doctor.
“You’ve got a minister that runs around saying that we’ve got 700 new doctors in the system, but they’re actually not new doctors,” he says again saying the minister “refuses to give us the answer”. “We haven’t got net new doctors and what we need are net new doctors,” he says.
The BC United solution to this is to tap the international medical graduates.
These are mostly Canadians that have studied abroad in places like Ireland, Australia, the Caribbean, the United States, he says. “They want to come back and practice in BC and they’re literally looking in the window and saying please let us in,” Falcon says.
He adds that the problem has compounded over the last five decades because of a buildup of rules and regulations and as a result, “it’s very, very hard to do so.”
Astute observers of the environment would also point a sage finger at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the College of Family Physicians of Canada as being part of this problem, but that hurdle has tumbled in the face of the sheer scale of the crisis in not just the province, but the country.
And while Falcon insists BC United will eliminate hurdles such as these, there is the inescapable fact that in his former role as health minister under Gordon Campbell’s provincial Liberal Party in 2009, there surely is some degree of culpability for the healthcare bureaucracy that currently exists.
And of course, even further back in 2002, Falcon had a stint in the newly-created position of Minister of State for Deregulation, where he cut “red tape” (ie, regulations that created costs or frustration for consumers and producers while providing little benefit to the public).
His reforms have indeed been credited with moving BC to among the best performing provinces at that time. Just how much red tape was cut in the ever growing calcification in the health sector specifically is unclear, but given his own admission of 50 years of a “buildup of rules and regulations”, one can surmise it wasn’t a priority for the government of the day, nor the liberal governments of which he belonged, that followed, nor the NDP governments that came before.
When it’s pointed out by the Times Chronicle that the current NDP government has also hit upon that very same “partial” solution, offering up the “Practice Ready Assessment” program which allows family practitioners trained outside of Canada to get licensed in BC far more quickly (tripling from 32 seats to 96 seats by March 2024), Falcon says, “they’ve been working on these things for years.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that in “recent history” the Liberals under Campbell and then Cristy Clark (whom Falcon just barely lost to in the 2011 leadership race by a margin of 52 to 48 per cent), were in power for nearly 16 years (2001 to 2017). The current NDP government has been in power for seven years (2017 to present).
One thing that does fit the bill of “working on for years” – depending on one’s perception of time – would be the medical program at Simon Fraser University. “For years, they said that graduates were supposed to be graduating in 2023 but they haven’t even started to open the thing up,” he says.
In October 2020, the New Democrats made an election pledge to create a second medical faculty at SFU in an effort to address the doctor shortage in the province. Only one university in the province – UBC – currently has a Faculty of Medicine and it only graduates about 174 family doctors each year.
The new SFU medical school is now expected to open in Surrey under the revised date of 2026, but even after the first cohort begins their studies, it would still be an estimated six years before they qualify as doctors, putting any impact from the doctor school out at about 2032. That would surely count as “many years”.
“So I think this is the chasm that I see is the chasm between the promises they make, which are all good, and the actual outcomes and results that we see, there is a huge chasm, we’ve got to get back to results.”
On this, the BC United leader clenches his bite more tightly. “If this is a government, like any government, that should be judged on the results they’re getting, then they’ve got a big problem.
“Because whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s housing prices, whether it’s rents, whether it’s the overdose crisis, the results they’re getting are the worst in the country and that’s not good.”
Throwing money at the healthcare problem is not a viable solution he observes, adding the over-arching healthcare bureaucracy is the problem “it’s actually stifling their ability to get things done.”
Falcon claims there are 73 vice presidents in the provincial health care system, “all earning well over a quarter million dollars a year.” In Alberta, with a population slightly smaller than BC’s, there are seven such positions he says, “and yet we’re driving the worst outcomes that we’ve ever seen.”
He pointed to this as a reason that BC United has attracted at least three medical doctors to run in the next election, “because they’re so concerned about what’s happening in our healthcare, and a big part of the problem is bureaucracy, we need to empower the frontline workers.
“Doctors and nurses need to be able to have the ability to make decisions in the best interest of patients. That’s not happening right now,” he says.
An NDP response would likely be that that issue is being addressed through the Primary Care Network (PCN) which aims to empower the whole healthcare sector to make decisions and referrals based on what is best for the patient outcome.
With more resources being pumped into the PCN across the province and particularly in the South Okanagan it may be too early to pass judgment, but the results should be clearer before voters hit the polls this fall.
The Times Chronicle will feature part two of the interview with Kevin Falcon in next week’s issue.
