Mr. Speaker, many things about health care keep me up at night. One concern I haven't spoken about yet is the department's growing focus on integrating private contracted paramedics into both small community health centres and our hospital emergency departments.
To be clear, paramedics do difficult, important work. Their specialty is in responding to emergency events and stabilizing patients for transport to take them to other medical professionals with broader scope. In the NWT, paramedics have mainly been working for municipalities with ambulance services, like Yellowknife, working for mines or with firefighting crews to support remote operations, or else working for private companies that run medivacs.
Two things are new that concern me: The push to give paramedics new roles in order to plug nurse vacancies and the shift towards privatization of our core health care functions.
Now, one of this Minister's top three priorities is to create the small community model of care, and this budget proposes adding a new full-time manager position devoted to that work. The problem is that model seems to revolve around expanding the role of private paramedics in primary care. Now, let's remember that paramedics specialize in acute care and transport, so why would we turn to them for the everyday care people need in small community health centres, everything from health promotion and screenings, to pre- and post-natal care, to chronic disease management. The explanation given is that right now we cannot recruit enough community health nurses or emergency room nurses to fill all the shifts, so we need to contract these paramedics for hire as helpers so the nurses don't burn out. Well, who could argue with that? Except why is the alternative to paramedics having nobody? Why aren't we focused on the need to hire more community health nurses when they're the ones with the skill sets we need most?
We have a health recruitment unit, we heard today. Reportedly, it's doing great, smashing its targets in hiring both indeterminate and casual RNs and community health nurses. Are they all leaving so soon? The shift towards filling gaps with private paramedics seems more like a short-sighted move of desperation than a long-term strategy we should pour more resources into. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will simply conclude by saying I will have more to say in the coming days about my concerns with the increasing privatization of primary care through paramedics. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.