Quebec's health care system is in for a major shake-up thanks to Bill 10, a plan to cut bureaucracy and improve direct health care services.
Under the plan, Quebec’s 18 regional health boards will be eliminated and hospitals and other institutions will lose their administrative boards. Only the island of Montreal, due to its higher population, will be allowed to have more than one local health care agency -- it will have five.
In all, 1,300 managers will lose their jobs. The government says this measure will save $220 million a year.
“We want to seize this opportunity to make what we consider to be a necessary change in the culture of our network, in order to make sure that once and for all the system will work for the patient, period. Not for themselves, not for their boss, not for me, not for the prime minister, to the patient,” said Health Minister Gaetan Barrette.
Barrette says Anglophone institutions will still have input even though they will lose their administrative boards.
The law will stipulate that health ministers must appoint members of cultural and linguistic minorities to the boards of the new super agencies that will take over.
Some of the unions representing health care workers say the bill doesn't attack the real problems with the health care system, overcrowding and the wait lines.
They say the minister needs to go much further and that they're worried about how the bill centralizes a lot of power into the minister's hands in terms of his control over pointing the boards and directing local health care delivery.
