Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.
One of the key planks in the winning platform of newly elected Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim was a pledge to hire 100 new police officers and 100 psychiatric nurses.
Mr. Sim’s platform was a clear effort to balance concerns about random violence, particularly in the city’s downtown, with an acknowledgment that many of the people committing the crimes are suffering from mental-health and addiction challenges.
Fulfilling the pledge won’t be easy. The mayor’s new chief of staff, Kareem Allam, told reporter Frances Bula the city has had some good preliminary conversations with the provincial government, though it is unclear whether the province has committed to help fund the mayor’s plan.
Premier John Horgan, in a recent TV interview, said “the initiatives by the incoming council are positive.”
“That gave us the warm fuzzies,” said Mr. Allam. “With the police, we are getting strong indications that we can make quite a lot of progress.”
On the nursing front, Mr. Sim’s team is hoping to see the nurses hired by Vancouver Police through Vancouver Coastal Health the same way that about a dozen nurses now get seconded from the health region to work with police on a program called Car 87. The program pairs them with a police officer when going out to calls about people in mental-health distress.
That would give those nurses access to patient records and institutional support, making the expanded program more efficient.
But how the city alone will hire 100 nurses when nurses are in such short supply everywhere is unclear.
Statistics Canada shows job vacancies in health during the first quarter of this year were nearly double what they were two years ago. Nurses and nurses aides were among the top-10 occupations with the largest job vacancy increases over that period.
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Earlier this week, the B.C. government announced a massive overhaul in how family doctors are paid, an effort to address another shortage that has left the provincial health care system threadbare.
With about a million people in the province without a family doctor, the province announced a new payment model that will offer family doctors about $135,000 more in gross annual pay as part of a package aimed at recruiting and retaining general practitioners.
The change moves away from the fee-for-service model that has been criticized for incentivizing short appointments and episodic care to one that compensates based on several factors, including the medical complexity of patients. Family doctors will be able to opt in beginning Feb. 1.
Under the fee-for-service model, family doctors are paid just over $30 a patient visit, regardless of the complexity of the patient’s issue. Their practices are operated as businesses, with physicians handling administrative tasks and paying for overhead costs, such as leasing clinic space and hiring staff.
Under the new model, payment is based on time spent with a patient, number of visits a day, number of patients in a doctor’s practice and their medical complexity. Doctors are also able to spend time on aspects of their work they were not previously compensated for, such as clinical administration and clinical teaching.
The change is one aspect of the tentative $708-million, three-year Physician Master Agreement, announced Monday by Health Minister Adrian Dix and Doctors of BC president Ramneek Dosanjh.
The new deal in British Columbia became political fodder in the Alberta Legislature on Tuesday.
NDP Leader Rachel Notley said the contract underlines that there’s a race on for health care talent, and Alberta is at a disadvantage because of what the party said is Premier Danielle Smith’s anti-science bent.
“People who are trained in health care – whether they are nurses’ aides, whether they are neurosurgeons – all understand evidence and science,” Ms. Notley said. “And those folks [are] being told they have to work in a health care system that is being led by a premier who doesn’t believe that vaccines are an important part of any health care regime. Those folks are much more likely to go somewhere else.”
But Steve Buick, a spokesman for the Alberta Health, noted the B.C. deal will raise family physician pay to $385,000 from $250,000 a year. In 2019-20, Alberta family doctors were paid $385,000 and a new agreement reached with the Alberta Medical Association will boost that compensation further.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.