I saw that we were in the news again the other day.
And by ‘saw’ I mean that 5 people sent me the article asking me how I felt about the media still mischaracterizing that project.
If I had to sum up my feelings about the way the media continually choose to misrepresent everything that Unified was and is, it would just be a sigh.
It is a choice to misrepresent the selfless courage of a Nurse Practitioner (NP) who chose to stand in defiance and protest against the province at a time when they were refusing to let NPs operate independently and refused to pay for them - during a doctor shortage.
It’s not the choice I would make, but it’s still a choice.
Let me ask you - if you have an on-going healthcare crisis whereby you don’t have enough family doctors but you do have a bunch of NPs willing to step into that role and help out, do you hamstring them by making them physically have to work in the same building as an MD to be paid by the public healthcare system? Or, do you encourage them to set up their own independent practices, with pay, so that they can work in areas where there aren’t enough family doctors to ‘supervise them’?
And if you live in a province where the healthcare system is refusing to allow NPs to operate independently and pay them through the publicly funded system, do you a) start crying about privatization if someone starts working independently in open defiance to force the province into changing their stupid stance or do you b) support and encourage them because you know that that’s going to help save a lot of peoples’ lives and instead focus your ire on the people who make the rules and harass them into changing said rules so that it’s no longer a privatization issue?
The media continually makes their choice there. And it’s not to the benefit of Nova Scotians.
For the record - we won that fight.
We won that fight because Nova Scotians demanded it.
So thank you to everyone who called MPs and MLAs, who came to the clinic in support of the practitioners, and everyone who stuck up for us and all NPs during that time.
But that’s not what bothers me about being called a ‘private medical clinic’. It bothers me that everything that that project was continually gets reduced to something so antagonistic to what it was really about.
Unified started as my thesis project for my osteopathic degree - it coordinated research from clinics across 8 Canadian provinces - and snowballed into a masters, 3 PhD’s and a Doctorate, which I am still completing (I’ll be finishing them all within the year!). It has also birthed a whole bunch of other research projects with various organizations outside of academia. It has led to independent NP-led medical clinics that are paid for by the province, the implementation of community care centres, health navigators, even province-paid spiritual counsellors at long-term care facilities.
To distill everything that this project was and has become into ‘that private medical clinic’ is, quite frankly, insulting. Especially given that where it began had everything to do with trying to add MORE services to the public healthcare system - NPs, osteopathy, counselling, nutrition services, massage, acupuncture, etc., so that people who can’t afford these services and suffer with chronic pain and illness can still access them through the public system rather than having to pay out of pocket.
That’s it. That was the project. To come up with a model, regulations, standards of practice, objective ways to measure both treatment success and practitioner competency, etc, etc, etc., that would allow for these services to be properly integrated into the Canadian healthcare system.
I graduated at the top of my class for the project, in case you were wondering how that turned out.
Where we ran into trouble - and the ensuing ‘private medical clinic’ debacle - was that we decided that, since we were already going to have this clinic full of medical and complementary medicine services for the research project, we might as well try to help out during the doctor shortage crisis and offer our services to the public. So, we designed a side project for the province and hospitals to see if we could help reduce wait times by ‘pre-triaging’ non-emergency cases - things like back pain, mental health issues that weren’t yet a crisis situation, whatever was clogging ERs and doctors’ offices that would be better served by being directed to the appropriate community resources and care. We had the NP on staff already to oversee the school project, so they would be able to judge if something was truly an emergency and needed the ER, or it could be dealt with in-house at one of the participating clinics. If you needed the ER, since you were pre-triaged at the clinic, we just made a phone call and you got to skip the triage part at the hospital.
The problem came in that, just before we were all set to open, the media frenzy started. The province quickly changed their tune and refused to allow our NP to practice in that capacity since we didn’t have an MD to oversee her.
Again - remember, doctor shortage. A main point of the original project was to prove that NPs roles could be expanded and they didn’t need that supervision.
They eventually caved and allowed her to do her job, but they refused to cover her pay.
We were already a few weeks away from opening, so the only way that people could access her services were if they paid out of pocket.
We eventually got all of that changed and now NPs can operate their own independent clinics, but the damage was done. We became forever known as ‘that private medical clinic’ instead of all of the other things that we were. It didn’t matter how much we tried to explain the actual project. We spoke to the media, did interviews, made videos - once that label was there, there was no getting rid of it.
Even now, years later, we are still referred to by the media as ‘that private medical clinic’ even though NPs are now covered by the publicly funded system, so it would no longer be a private medical clinic if it were still open. Which it isn’t. We closed at the end of my thesis when the NP moved back to Alberta.
But, I can’t be all that mad about it, to be perfectly honest. All of that international attention and political hubbub actually led me to some pretty exciting national and international collaborations.
So thank you, media, for your continued attention.
The success of Unified and everything it has grown into is really a direct result of your ridiculousness.
Nova Scotia, the country, and even the world will still benefit from the knowledge gained by that project, even if, because of you, it was so much harder than it had to be and took so much longer to actually implement some of the findings from it than it would have otherwise. And yes, NDP - I’m looking at you too when I say this. You chose to actively attack a Metis woman led school project that was trying to bring more services into the public domain just to score cheap political points because of who I choose to volunteer my time with. It was a super low move. You failed a lot of Nova Scotians by doing so. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.
My advice? This new ‘private medical clinic’ in Dartmouth that is actually a group of family practice nurses wouldn’t be a ‘private clinic’ if the province decided to pay them for their services as well.
It’s not a new thing. Other provinces cover the costs for those kinds of services under their provincial healthcare plans.
Maybe it’s time Nova Scotia decided to demand creative solutions to the doctor shortage problem by covering the services of other providers who are capable and qualified to address certain patient concerns instead of crying ‘privatization - how dare they?’ every time those providers are forced to offer their services to the public for a fee instead.
Healthcare providers stepping up and trying to help out in a crisis is literally what they do. It’s time the government supported them in those efforts and ensured that our public healthcare system remains public by paying them for those efforts instead of villainizing them.
After all, it was brave NPs who decided to step up and offer their services for a fee instead of waiting for the province that forced the government to then cover those services to protect our public system. Think about where we would be right now if that hadn’t happened.
So good for you, Family Practice Nurses, for stepping up in a crisis and deciding not to wait for the government. You get out there and force their hand! And Nova Scotia - do what you do! Get outraged! Complain! Make some noise! Just make sure you’re directing it at the right people by supporting these brave nurses’ efforts by calling on the government to change the rules so that these services can be covered by the public system.
Hope this helps clear up any confusion about where I stand on the matter.
If anyone has any questions about that project, or any of my many other on-going projects, feel free to reach out and ask! I love questions!
Til next time, Folks!