Digby’s doctor dilemna

“The situation is serious,” says Digby warden Jim Thurber of the doctor shortage at Digby General.

The emergency department has been closed every Friday for the last three months because there simply hasn’t been a doctor available. And there’s no end in sight to the closures.

That’s serious all right.

So serious Thurber says the municipality and the town should hire professional recruiters and offer signing bonuses to doctors.

He is right, but only in so far as someone should be offering a signing bonus to doctors to set up in rural areas. But should it be the municipalities?

Health care is supposed to be a provincial responsibility.

For years we’ve heard that the province is doing their best to find doctors for the area. We’ve been told we’re short doctors because Canada in general is short doctors.

That may be true.

But now we hear we can have doctors… for a price. And if we hire professional recruiting agencies.

Thurber and the councils are doing the right thing – someone needs to do something before the health care system in Digby disintegrates.

Our provincial government should have long ago implemented an effective program to encourage doctors to work in the rural areas of the province.

And if the answer is signing bonuses, they should be coming out of provincial coffers.

The province has literally said to the municipality, “We’ll hire professional recruiters but only if you agree to pay for it.”

Huh? Since when is it the municipality’s responsibility? Should access to health care depend on the community’s ability to pay?

The province must reverse the trend of downloading. They must provide real leadership and funding to put doctors in communities suffering doctor shortages.

Not just in communities with deep pockets.