Dear Editor:
Re: Hospital issues are ongoing, Letters to the editor, The Record, by Judy Darcy, Jan. 6.
New Westminster's recently appointed NDP candidate said in her letter last week: "what's happening at RCH is a symptom of a bigger problem."
I can't agree more. It's time to put patients first and make the changes necessary in order to protect and defend our public health-care system, and it's time to do it now.
Never is this more apparent than when New Westminster's own Royal Columbian Hospital, the regional trauma centre for the Lower Mainland, experiences one of its heavy load situations.
As someone with family members who work on the front lines of health care at almost every major hospital in the Lower Mainland, including RCH, I am very familiar with the day-to-day experiences of our valued health-care professionals and the great contribution they make to our society.
In listening to them, the issues and the solutions these front-line workers offer up seem to differ greatly from what I see being brought forward by the special interest focused NDP candidate, who just happens to have recently retired as the Hospital Employees' Union's chief negotiator, in her carefully worded letter.
These front-line workers talk of a system that needs to be more flexible in terms of which staff can handle what issue.
They talk of the public not understanding the appropriate use of ERs and huge bureaucratic inefficiencies which diminish overall capacity. They also talk about a need to invest in illness-prevention awareness, as well as the need to offer better support for seniors at home.
Also, front-line health-care workers see a system that needs to be refocused so it can better meet the needs of patients in their communities, rather than just the financial preferences of a bureaucracy.
And they want us to be investing in the health of individuals so they don't have to be in a hospital in the first place; for example, the B.C. Liberal government's highly successful QuitNow.ca program, which offers the public access to smoking cessation products.
About 34,000 people have taken up this unique opportunity in just a few months since the program began, potentially saving the health-care system tens of millions of dollars in health-care spending over the coming decades and offering a higher quality of life for those British Columbians.
What they really don't seem to agree with is that more money for the big hospitals alone will solve the problem, as New Westminster's NDP candidate concludes.
It's unfortunate to see that the NDP and its special interest candidate aren't listening to these front-line workers, let alone British Columbians.
All we get from the NDP, and its biglabour-boss-turned-politician representative in New Westminster, is rhetoric and reactionary spending promises with no plan to pay for them.
It's time to break the repetitive cycle of the past several decades of simply painting over problems with money. It's time to engage in a robust provincial debate with British Columbians via an independent public commission process, with health-care providers and all the stakeholders so that we can cure the real illness in the public health-care system, not just the symptoms.
The result of this process should be a plan to build a health-care system that lives in the reality of the 21st century; one that delivers the care people need where, and the way, they need it, and one that better supports health-care providers, so that public health care will be there for all of us in the generations to come.
I am sure that any one of those patients receiving care in a hallway will tell you there is no more time to waste.
British Columbians want the politics out of health care and the "lines in the sand" washed away. They want their health to be the first and only bottom line.
I believe all of this is possible when we take the "agendas" out of the health-care debate and replace them with empathy, understanding and compassion. Then, and only then, will we be truly putting patients first and ensuring they get the care and dignity they deserve.
Hector D. Bremner, candidate seeking the B.C. Liberal nomination in New Westminster
