Quebec unveils healthcare reform plan

The Quebec government unveiled its plan to reform the province’s healthcare system by 2025, with 50 measures presented, including access to family doctors, home care, and decentralized management.

Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé said at a press conference Tuesday morning that the measures are ambitious, but that they will be able to deliver them.

“The work that we have done over the last three years demonstrate that we have the will to make those changes,” he said.

#WATCH: “The work that we have done over the last three years demonstrate that we have the will to make those changes,” says Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé, unveiling the province’s plan to reform the healthcare system by 2025.

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Dubé added that the pandemic has only reinforced the need for these changes.

“We don’t want to live through being dependent on the system, being able to force people to do things they don’t want to do because the system could not follow the pandemic,” he said. 

The plan highlights some solutions to the system’s challenges, including eliminating forced overtime for health care workers.

“Forced overtime has impeded the quality of life of nurses at home and has made their work conditions much more unsafe because when a nurse is forced to work overtime, it’s very exhausting,” says emergency nurse and owner of Nomadic Nurse Agency, Melanie Jade Boulerice.

Boulerice, working on the frontline, wonders if the elimination of forced overtime will lead to longer shifts and continued staffing shortages.

“We’re already working short staffed now, and then if we eliminate forced overtime, we’re going to be working extremely short staffed,” she said. “How are we solving that problem?”

Dubé said he wants to hire at least 1,000 nurses and 3,000 clerks to take on some of the bureaucratic tasks that now fall to clinical staff.

#WATCH: “It’s ambitious,” said Éric Gingras, president of Centrale des unions du Québec, of the province’s proposed healthcare reforms by 2025. He said he hopes to see the changes, like better working conditions, implemented in the near future.

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— Alyssia (@rubertuccinews) March 29, 2022

“It’s ambitious,” said Éric Gingras, president of Centrale des unions du Québec, representing nurses.

“What’s written down in the 80 pages cannot be done in three or six months and I understand it has to be in years. But on the short term, when you talk about working conditions, when you talk about working with employees, making the right choices into the schedules and everything around that, that can be done rapidly,” he added.

The government no longer promises that every Quebecer will have access to a family doctor by the end of their mandate, with almost a million people not currently paired with one.

But they plan to set up a phone line to put Quebecers in touch with health-care professionals for consultations in a one-stop service.

“We start slowly, we start in certain regions,” Dubé said. “Probably about 50% by the end of the summer, people will be able to go through that. But I want more.”

Some other the measures in the plan:

• Limit E.R. wait times to 90 minutes by setting up command posts
• Digitizing the healthcare system
• Giving nurse practitioners, paramedics and pharmacists more power to treat patients
• Paying family doctors more for every patient they take in
• Expanding telehealth services throughout Quebec
• Putting more money into seniors care, including better meals in CHSLDs
• A shift towards homecare
• Continuing to use private clinics to catch up on surgeries
• Addition of hospital beds, massive recruitment of staff and technological modernization to simplify administrative tasks

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The announcement comes just months ahead of the provincial election, which is slated for Oct. 3. There isn’t, however, a dollar amount allocated to these measures. The Minister only reiterating what the March 22 budget put aside for the health system, with $10.3-billion to strengthen it and a budget increase of 6.3 per cent in the coming year.

In the Health Ministry’s document of the plan titled, ‘More human, more efficient – A plan to implement the necessary changes in health,’ they say, “After 2025, there will still be steps to take, but the health and social services network will already be significantly strengthened and modernized, thus paving the way for lasting changes.”

“It’s what we all wanted to hear,” Boulerice said. “It’s election time right now, so let’s see, I need to see it to believe it.”