From the desk of Dr. Michael Gardam, Health PEI CEO
Hi everybody,
Today I wanted to briefly talk about our hospitals, to quash all the rumours that I hear every day.
This was made worse during the election period when healthcare was everybody’s favourite topic (and rightly so!) and hospitals were used to hit the other candidates on the head (metaphorically speaking of course).
Here we go and in no particular order:
- We need every hospital bed we have. During my time as CEO, there have never been any plans to close any of our hospitals, nor will there be!
- When we have to temporarily withdraw services, it is because we don’t have enough staff, not because it is part of a hidden plot to take away a service permanently; See point 1. The Prince County Hospital has been at the centre of this kind of speculation this week, with the recent anesthetist shortage and Internal Medicine shortages. We’ll have to have short-term plans to bridge the gap in these service areas, but make no mistake – we need these services and a fully functioning PCH, as we do all our hospitals!
- We never, ever want to withdraw services. We do so because we have no choice. Health PEI has to do as much good for as many Islanders as possible. When we are short staffed, we have to make awful choices to take away resources from the few to help the many, and we want the lack of services to last as short as possible.
- Having enough staff is by far our biggest issue, as I said in my last email to you. As the population grows, we will need more and more people. We are working very hard on our internal processes to make it far easier to hire and keep people, and we are also working to change those things that happen externally to Health PEI.
- Our hospitals have worked in silos for decades (a remnant of the old PEI regional health authorities); however, they were working more closely together than ever before—we are really starting to live up to our “One Island Health System” tagline.
- We can use our hospitals better and more efficiently. We are starting to do the work to figure out community needs and how best those needs can be satisfied. A big piece of this relates to staffing again: if we can staff our long term care homes so that all beds are open, then we can start to give care to people in the best setting for them.
Have a great weekend everybody. For those of you working this weekend, thank you for giving your team members a break.
Thanks,
Michael
Please send questions, comments, or submissions for these notes to emclean@gov.pe.ca, subject line “Notes for Michael”.