by Trevor Greenway
Local Journalism Initiative
Wakefield is set to lose its fourth doctor in the last two years when Dr. Jacques Ménard takes his well-deserved retirement this summer.
And with no replacements found yet for Dr. Satenstein, Dr. Amani Ben Moussa, Dr. Folkerson and now Ménard, Hills medical advocacy groups are concerned that the region’s doctor shortage is about to get even worse.
“It’s very concerning, and there’s a lot of doctors and specialists that have left the region, and we have to look at why they’re leaving,” said SOS Outaouais executive-director Jean Pigeon. “And, unfortunately, it’s due to exactly what we’ve been addressing: the fact that there’s a lack of funding, and there’s a lack of human resources that is putting tremendous pressure on a very difficult workplace.”
Regional healthcare advocacy group SOS Outaouais has been banging the same drum for over a year now – that the Outaouais region is grossly underfunded when compared to other regions in Quebec. According to the Observatoire de développement de l’Outaouais, the region is underfunded by an estimated $200 million per year.
Pigeon admitted that doctor salaries in Quebec are on par with those of Ontario, and added that the region isn’t losing doctors because of low salaries but more because of working environments: long overtime shifts, a lack of medical technicians and a lack of medical technology that help doctors properly diagnose patients.
“It comes down to: Do they have the right environment to work in?” said Pigeon. “Do they have enough staff to support them? Because doctors don’t work alone. They work in teams, so they need those teams to be available. If you just look at the region’s hospitals, there are so many positions that are still not filled, and doctors can’t diagnose blindly – they need to have medical imagery.”
Pigeon said his organization is also concerned about how the new Santé Québec health department has rolled out, as 31 per cent of Quebecers said they feel their health services have diminished under the new department, according to a recent public opinion poll.
Santé Québec CEO Genevieve Biron also just fired her Number Two, Frédéric Abergel, after he reportedly advocated for giving local establishments more autonomy. Pigeon said his organization has been trying to meet with Biron for over a month but have yet to hear a response.
“Ms. Biron wants to ‘measure public perception’? We offer her a clear statement: the Outaouais population has no confidence in Santé Québec,” wrote Pigeon in a news release last week.
Biron declined an interview with the Low Down, as did CISSS de l’Outaouais (CISSSO) CEO Marc Bilodeau. Bilodeau is currently trying to cut $90 million from the region’s health budget, as Biron is slashing $150 billion from the province’s health ministry.
CISSSO told the Low Down that those cuts would be made public in a couple of weeks.
Lack of technology hampering recruitment
If you ask local health watchdog group Vigi Santé why it’s so difficult to recruit doctors to Wakefield, he won’t bring up salary or vacation time or bonuses, but he will talk about a lack of technology at both Wakefield medical clinics and the village hospital that he feels is swaying young doctors from setting up their practices here.
“The hospital is not favourable to a young doctor wanting to practise there because we have no technology,” said Vigi Sante spokesperson Marcel Chartrand. “And young doctors coming out of school, they get trained with new technology, and then they’re going to come here, and they’ll do maybe a week at the Wakefield Hospital and then say, ‘What is happening here? There’s nothing. There’s no diagnostic equipment that I could call innovative that I could use to properly assess my patients other than radiology.’ So they’re saying, ‘Well, not very interesting.’ So they look elsewhere.”
Chartrand said it “happens every day” when a doctor at the Wakefield Hospital has to send a patient to Hull or Gatineau to get a specialized diagnostic scan to properly assess them.
There are currently 78,000 residents in the Outaouais without a family doctor and nearly 7,500 in the des Collines region.
