Last week the provincial authorities made a gargantuan statement.
The CAQ’s golden boy for the Outaouais, Mathieu Lacombe, along with newly christened Health Minister Christian Dubé, announced that there was a 600 bed hospital destined for the region, but were curiously short of details.
The CAQists had been overt in their support of a brand spanking new facility for the region, though they only promised a project exceeding 170 beds during their election campaign, not the mega-hospital they revealed on Wednesday.
While it’s good news that this area is even on the radar of the officials in Quebec City, given that the Outaouais receives less health care funding per capita than other comparable regions, as always, the devil is in the details.
Other than the number of beds, there was little in this latest announcement that hadn’t already been proposed back in 2018. It should be noted that the CAQ did not consult with local health authorities before promising this new infrastructure on the campaign trail, according to the head of the CISSSO at the time, Jean Hébert.
Hopefully they’ve done a little homework in the meantime.
As nice as it would be to have a shiny super-hospital, there are existing challenges in our area that still need to be addressed, primarily staff shortages. A new facility might attract more doctors and health care workers to the region, but it might not. What good is a hospital if there’s no one to work the floor?
Most importantly, what will this change of focus mean for our community hospital and local services? Will this be a way for the regional authorities to liquidate the smaller players like Shawville, Wakefield or Maniwaki, leaving them as glorified clinics, or will there be a role for proximity health care?
We are currently living with the collateral damage brought about by the Couillard Liberals’ restructuring of the health sector, further changes to the landscape could result in a larger concentration of services in the city.
The fact of the matter is, we don’t have many details to go on, government representatives have been extremely light on hard facts. Lacombe has refused to say that facilities will be closed, but as Patrick Duquette pointed out in his analysis piece for Le Droit, it isn’t hard to imagine existing hospitals like Hull becoming something akin to a clinic or long term care facility.
This mega-project is certainly a statement, but it’s one that could be interpreted a few different ways depending on where you’re seated. It’s nice to see significant funding being invested in our neck of the woods, but we don’t even know where this facility will be located, let alone the changes it will bring to health care services in the Pontiac.
Residents should be leery of any grand promises of large structural change, especially one this vague and grandiose. It’s important to focus on the challenges we face right now, which includes a lack of staff in all departments. On top of local expectant mothers being forced to deliver their children in Pembroke, Gatineau and the back of ambulances, other services such as lab work and physiotherapy are gradually shifting to the city.
Rural health care is in crisis, due to an emphasis on specialization and consolidation of resources in urban areas. This latest announcement of “restructuring” should be setting off alarm bells for local officials or anyone that wants to receive health care in the Pontiac.
Change is inevitable, but it cannot always be defined as progress.
Caleb Nickerson
