Nurses' association hopeful ahead of Quebec's health-care reform announcement Tuesday

Quebec's health minister is planning to unveil a major plan Tuesday to "restore" the health-care system.

 

Details of the health-care reform, which is expected to cost billions of dollars, will be unveiled at a news conference at 9 a.m. with Health Minister Christian Dubé, Junior Health Minister Lionel Carmant, as well as Marguerite Blais, the minister responsible for seniors.

 

Watch the health-care announcement live on ctvnewsmontreal.ca at 9 a.m.

 

A copy of the 50-point plan was leaked to Radio-Canada last Thursday and includes changes that would prevent Quebecers from waiting longer than 90 minutes in the emergency room.

 

That's a promise that has been made before, but to do it this time the document shows new command centres will be created to better direct patients to the right department, modeled on the centre at the Jewish General Hospital.

 

It also appears that the CAQ government is moving away from one of its key election promises of giving every Quebecer a family doctor.

 

The Radio-Canada report said the province is instead setting up a phone line where you can speak to a health-care professional, such as a nurse or paramedic, but not necessarily a doctor. Out of the 1.8 million people residing in Montreal, more than 800,000 of them are without a family doctor and only about half have put their names on the two-year waiting list.

 

The province also plans to end mandatory overtime for nurses by hiring 1,000 nurses from abroad and 3,000 more administrative workers to take on some of the workload.

 

However, the Quebec Nurses' Association (QNA) said more staff isn't the only solution.

 

"One thing that's important that I hear the government repeat several times was that forced overtime was an issue of staffing and it really isn't just an issue of staffing, it's also an issue of management issues. So it's important to understand that if the issue is management-based, it needs managerial solutions," said Natalie Stake-Doucet, a registered nurse and president of the QNA.

 

Stake-Doucet said she's trying not to be cynical because "we get really big promises before an election and post-election it's really the politically easy targets that are changed within healthcare," but she is hopeful the plan will be grand in scope and address the "decline" in the health-care system.

 

She also said management should focus on retention because too many employees are leaving their jobs.

 

Premier François Legault was supposed to be at Tuesday's news conference but is being sidelined after recently becoming infected with COVID-19.

 

He said in a lengthy Facebook post that family medicine is at the "heart" of the CAQ government's action plan and that the pandemic has illustrated how fragile the system is.

 

"We also learned lessons from the pandemic. It has been realized that our health network has no margin of maneuver to add patients in a crisis situation. There was already a shortage of employers for beneficiaries and nurses before the pandemic. And, with the pandemic, we've lost some of the staff," the premier wrote.

 

"So what we are proposing is not a consultation or another commission of study, it is a plan of ACTION. An action plan that goes a lot through decentralization towards regions and sub-regions. A decentralization of the choice of means in the hands of the leaders of institutions. But also an accountability of these leaders on the results."

 

More details of the plan will be announced Tuesday.