May 6, 2025
Hi everyone,
Good news doesn’t often make headlines, and health care coverage is no exception. I want to deliver our good news directly to you. We are making progress.
At the heart of that progress is YOU, our dedicated health care team.
Your compassion, professionalism, and determination are what make this work possible. From frontline care to behind-the-scenes coordination, your contributions are the foundation of everything we’ve accomplished.
Progress is incremental in health care and it’s important that you are recognized for your hard work and deep commitment that keeps building real results.
This is just a brief highlight of what you have accomplished recently, and it really is remarkable.
Primary Care Access
- We are relentlessly focused on connecting patients to primary care!
- 2,554 Islanders have been connected with a provider this year; we are on track to meet our target of 10,000 this year.
- We look forward to standing up a nation leading example of team based collaborative care at the UPEI PMH.
Staffing & Recruitment
- You are actively recruiting for over 623 roles through the flexible hiring initiative.
- You hired 1,269 nurses, allied health professionals and support staff in casual, permanent and temporary positions in the last year. Amazing!
- 10 newly graduated nurse practitioners are now working in both primary and specialty care. We lead the country in NPs per capita! That’s a great title to hold.
- 80 internationally educated nurses will join us this year, with 30 arriving in July.
- 65 nursing students are set to graduate this spring; 61 will be joining Health PEI. We’re watching the accelerated class coming this fall and hope to hire all of those as well!
- We’ve hired another 11 physicians, building on 41 last year. While our numbers are small, we lead the country in increasing LFM physicians per capita as well.
Medical Education
- This August we’ll welcome 20 inaugural medical students, and you’ve leaned in to support their teaching and training. Thank you!
Access & Capacity
- The ICU at Prince County Hospital is on-track to reopen this summer. A remarkable outcome for the community and the staff.
- Emergency Department wait times during the first three months of 2025 were the lowest they’ve been in two years, dropping by 10% at the median and 8% at the higher end when compared to the same period last year. As a result, fewer patients are leaving without being seen, down to 10% this April compared to 14% last year. This happened during one of the worst flu seasons in history.
- Admitted patients waiting in the emergency department has dropped from 46 in January to 26 today. This is so important for our patients and their families. Care delivered in the right place.
- Alternative Level of Care (ALC) patients have decreased by 13% since mid-January.
Surgical Volumes
- We are providing 1,000 more cataract surgeries (more than double) than the same period last year (1,944 vs. 934 last year). We will clear the waitlist this year!
- Annual surgical volumes are expected to increase by 10%, meaning 600 more procedures and we’ll continue to build our capacity in the community.
MRI Wait Times
- You have completely turned around the trend on diagnostic imaging wait times. This means better care for patients and more support for the providers treating them.
- Urgent scans now meet the two-week benchmark.
- Semi-urgent scans without contrast improved from 16 to 4 weeks.
- Semi-urgent scans with contrast dropped from 64 to 15 weeks.
- Routine scans are now at 80 weeks, down from 156 (target of 12 weeks).
Mental Health Services
- Open Access Counselling continues to grow, and there is no wait time for self-referral mental health support across the province. This is a feature of our system not available anywhere else across the country. Amazing!
Long term care
- We have more long-term care beds open than ever in history, 1,296 combined between public and private.
- And we're modernizing our management of these beds. Great work to the team implementing the EMR, creating electronic charting and a Province-wide approach to conducting standardized resident assessments.
And there is so much more. I receive many messages from patients and families about their phenomenal care experiences, how clean our facilities are, and how kind our volunteers and staff are. When I receive complaints, I see us accepting them openly, learning, and acting on them to improve our healthcare system. This is how dedicated and professional you are. Thank you.
You should be proud, I certainly am. Everything you do has a ripple effect on the system and one another.
We know there’s lots of work yet to do, and we are doing it. But today, and every day, please take a moment to accept my gratitude and to share it with your colleagues. I am blown away by your talent and unwavering commitment, and I can’t thank you enough.
Your contributions are making a real difference here at Health PEI and across the province for all Islanders.
Sincerely,
Mel