New Brunswick Medical Society seeks more funding for province’s health-care system
Global News
Paula Keating, president of the New Brunswick Medical Society and a family doctor for over 30 years, said many health-care workers in the province are burned out.
The New Brunswick Medical Society is calling on the province to put more money into its health-care system.
Paula Keating, the society’s president, has been a family physician for over 30 years and said many health-care workers are burned out.
“We’re being asked to do more and more with less and less every day. We’re being asked to take on more patients when people are at their max. It’s unsustainable,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.
“This is probably the worst I’ve seen it (…) of people expressing dissatisfaction, wanting to retire early, choose alternative pathways and wanting to leave medicine altogether.”
Tom Bateman, a political science professor at Saint Thomas University, said health care would likely be a top-of-mind issue for voters in a possible provincial election.
“It will be more important now because the difficulties are very, very apparent to just about everybody. … It’s more acute now than ever,” he said, noting for example the growing wait list for primary care physicians and long emergency room wait times.
Claire Johnson, a professor in health-care management at the Université de Moncton, said the government should create teams-based primary care in order to ensure more timely access.
“If we’ve got this huge surplus, there are creative things that we could do,” she said, referring to the province’s $1 billion surplus from 2022.