The health critic for Nova Scotia’s NDP is calling for more data to be released on the province’s primary-care provider waitlist.
Nova Scotia Health used to release a detailed report showing how many people were added and removed from the list each month, as well as where they were located in the province. Now, the health authority only announces the monthly total.
At a meeting at the legislature on Monday, interim CEO Karen Oldfield celebrated the progress they’ve made in the last year, bringing the list down by nearly half.
It now sits at 87,879 Nova Scotians who need a physician or nurse practitioner.
“On the one hand, I’m ecstatic because the work that we’re doing is working,” she said. “On the other hand … we have a lot of work yet to do.”
When pressed by the NDP’s Rod Wilson, Oldfield said that 24,990 names have been added to the waitlist since January.
Wilson says they’re manipulating the data.
NDP health critic Rod Wilson, a family physician, says the government is skewing the data. (Taryn Grant/CBC)
A release from the health authority in July said 1,576 people had been attached to a new provider. What it left out was that 5,001 people were added to the list, a number Oldfield revealed in the meeting at the legislature.
“We just want the full disclosure,” Wilson said after the meeting. “It’s not a big ask for people to know how many in my community, what’s the government’s project plan and when might I get to a primary-care provider?”
Part of the reason why the list is going down is the verification process.
Karen Oldfield, interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health, says they still need to verify that the waitlist is accurate before they decide what data should be released. (Robert Short/CBC)
Nova Scotia Health is calling everyone on the list to make sure they haven’t moved away or found a provider on their own.
Oldfield said the health authority still has to verify about 27,000 names and she expects that work to be completed in the fall. But she won’t commit to releasing more detailed reports at that time.
“Once we figure out where we are and what we’re looking at going forward, we can make some determinations about what’s the right thing for Nova Scotia and for the Department of Health and Wellness.”
Oldfield said it would be impossible to eliminate the list altogether, because people are always moving and practitioners are always retiring, but her goal is to match people to clinics as much as possible.
She said the health authority knows there are people in need of a family doctor who aren’t on the list, and is encouraging them to contact 811.
“We can’t help them if we don’t know.”