As the election campaign draws to a close, the leaders of the three major parties are talking about healthcare.
According to our most recent online poll, over 50% of people in the South Shore consider it the most important issue.
PC Leader Jamie Baillie will be in Bridgewater on Sunday for a health care rally at PC headquarters.
He says the Liberals have failed on their promise to deliver a family doctor for every Nova Scotian.
“I know people need doctors now and we have an urgent and aggressive doctor recruitment plan that starts on day one to get doctors and nurse practioners into communities that need them.”
Baillie says his party will address the doctor shortage immediately after taking office.
“We’re not going to wait five to ten years to get those doctors into communities like Bridgewater, like Lunenburg. Our plan starts on day because you cannot ask people to sit back without a doctor while a group in Halifax figures out the future.”
All three parties agree the collaborative care model is the way forward.
Liberal leader Stephen McNeil says his government will begin building 70 new centres.
“They’ll begin right away. They’ll build on what we’ve been doing so those will start rolling out right away. We’re financing them through this budget and the next three, so they would start seeing them this fall.”
McNeil says he’s made changes to bring more doctors and residents into the healthcare system.
“We’ve put aside an additional twenty residency seats, that’ll take us to about fifty-five, fifty-six residency seats every year in Nova Scotia. That’ll be twenty more than we currently have. Which will allow us to access more family physicians.”
NDP Leader Gary Burrill says the McNeil government hasn’t opened a nursing home bed in their time in office and that needs to change.
“More and more of our hospital space is being taken up with people who are not hospital patients. They are people waiting for placement in nursing homes.”
Burrill says government needs to make strategic investments in health care.
“We need to invest in collaborative emergency centres to take the pressure off emergency rooms. We need to invest in access to primary care to take the pressure off our emergency rooms. And we have to invest in nursing homes in order to take the pressure off our hospitals.”
To hear the full conversation with each of the leaders, listen to South Shore Sunday Morning this weekend at 9:00am on CKBW.
