ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Adam Olsen - Salt Spring Health Issues

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Damian Inwood chats to Adam Olsen about the pressing healthcare issues facing Salt Spring Island

Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events, we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guest and review some of the key points discussed. Welcome to episode two where Damien Inwood interviews Adam Olson, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands about Salt Spring healthcare issues. So I'm here with Adam Olson, the MLA for, fill me in on the actual title. It's Saanich, yeah, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands. Saanich North and the Islands. And we've just been through a two-hour discussion with the Ask Salt Spring group. And one of the topics that came up,

which took a considerable amount of time, was the question of health care on the island and the lack of walk-in clinics for people here. And that was something that you talked for quite a long time about. The need for a walk-in clinic of some kind and the challenges around it, maybe you could fill me in as to what you see are the challenges for getting that done. Well, I would say that the discussion about health care on Salt Spring and on the neighboring southern Gulf Islands

always does take up quite a bit of time because it is a very challenging topic. On each of the islands, of course, is somewhat different. They've got clinics that are community-governed and community-run on the outer Gulf Islands. And on Salt Spring. There isn't a co-located facility for a team-based primary care to be delivered. So it is challenging.

There's a lack of space for a team of health care practitioners to operate out of. Getting that land zoned and serviced is very challenging. I think we talked at length about the challenges that that causes. Yeah, and you said that you felt that the Lady Minto emergency department was being used very inefficiently. What did you mean by that? Well, emergency rooms are there for emergency situations. They should not be used for, they should not be relied on, I should say, for prescription renewals and for what would normally be primary care, what a primary care practitioner would deliver. So they're at the emergency room providing a couple of different services, and I think what it's doing is it's creating increased pressure

on that very important community resource here on Salt Spring. And I think it's incumbent upon the provincial government to be working with the health authority and with the community to develop a community primary health care location so then it will relieve that pressure and allow the emergency room to do what it's supposed to be doing rather than serving functions like walk-in clinic would or the basic provision of primary health care. Right. And I think we talked about supplementing a walk-in clinic with possibly a mobile clinic too.

That would be something that we could certainly use on Salt Spring. Yeah, it was suggested that, you know, as has been the case for a variety of different health services, that it's been very challenging to get the funding for the mobile clinic. I wouldn't look at the clinic necessarily as a replacement to a properly functioned walk-in clinic or a clinic that hosts a team of health care practitioners working together to deliver primary care to the population here on Salt Spring. Or, you know, in coordination with independent primary doctors is an example as well. There's a role for them to play. There's a role for all of these health services and the mobile clinic could also provide a much needed ability

to do outreach in certain parts of the community. I think you said that Island Health delivers the services they deliver but it's difficult to infuse community values into what they do in places like Salt Spring Island, that they provide a kind of a large blanket service and they don't necessarily respond to local needs very efficiently. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that my colleague Sonia First knows, she's the leader of the BC Green Party and the member for Cowichan Valley one of the things that we've been advocating for are for community health clinics which are you know the

provision of of community health governed by members of the community and and really infusing the priorities of the community and the values of the community into that health delivery. An example of this was raised during the conversation about kidney disease and access to dialysis. And this is an example of where, you know, a health authority might take a look at the community and say, oh, there's all these reasons why. It's just easier for us to ask the people who need dialysis to go to Victoria to do it. But a community like Salt Spring is a compassionate community, an empathetic community to those people who need access to dialysis and might very well agree that it's a priority of the community.

And so therefore, in a community health setting, a community health model, they might make that a priority and they might, uh, then design services that then allow for people to not have to travel off island and spend eight or nine hours, three days a week accessing, uh, the renal care that they need. So, you know, I think that this is where community values and community priorities can start to be you know injected into the decision making and into the services that are being delivered you know might very well be that the community looks at the situation with family doctors and says how can we support them or might take a look at the nursing situation, say how can we better support those health care practitioners. So it's about a relationship,

and I think the current service delivery in health care is very much top-down, and what we've been proposing is that we infuse a bottom-up approach to it that allows the community to really drive the type of services that they value and focus on that. Is the government showing any signs of supporting initiatives like local initiatives where a nonprofit, say, set up a group here and then ask for funding from the government? I'd really like to answer that in a very positive way. Unfortunately, what I have to say is that I've seen this government take a very top-down approach to this. The idea very much has to come from the Ministry of Health, or else it is a very rocky road

and very challenging to get the government to agree to do that. So I think we'll continue to advocate that the government reorients itself and allows for communities the ability to really drive that decision-making and deliver the kind of health care that the community values. But unfortunately, what we're seeing right now is a ministry that is very much driven top-down and health care authorities that, you know, are very large and very focused on the work that they're doing, and the communities then just kind of accept the programs and services that the health authority is prioritizing. I think we touched on the impact of the ferries, obviously,

on people who have essential medical treatments such as dialysis and other things and how difficult that makes it for the people living on an island really to get the health care they need. There was sort of a different kind of discussion going on about whether, in fact, we had to settle for that because we're living on an island. What's your view on that? Well, I think there is a certain reality that when the wind is blowing very hard, that it's very challenging to land ferries and even water taxis or helicopters,

depending on the weather situation that is existing. So the reality and I think the example of someone who needs to go off island to access dialysis, that needs to happen for that person's health care to be maintained. They must go and receive dialysis treatment. becomes very challenging that if a ferry system becomes unreliable because they, you know, for example, what we've seen over the last couple of years, they don't have enough staff and one staff member isn't able to make it and the ferry can't run, that will strand people who absolutely need to receive health care services. And in this case, you're not necessarily going to be accessing the water ambulance or helicopters. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to be empathy for those that have these long-awaited meetings with a health specialist. They've been, you know, scheduled it for a long time.

And then out of nowhere, there is a ferry cancellation due to staffing shortages or due to extreme weather. And that is one of the hazards of living on an island, for sure, and one of the, you know, really difficult situations that I hear about in my constituency office regularly. It is, you know, and to even, I guess, a lesser extent, but it happens for Vancouver Island residents as well, for going over and accessing services in Vancouver. But it is more acutely felt in my constituency, in the southern Gulf Islands in particular, when people have medical practitioners that don't live on the islands.

Those services probably will never't live on the islands. Those services probably will never be established on the islands and need to get off the island in order to access them. Do you have any hope that the new ferry commissioner will in fact be able to improve the situation? It doesn't seem to have happened yet. I know he's only been in there a short time, but it seems like there's even more cancellations due to staffing shortages now than there were a few months ago. Yeah, so Nicholas Hemeneff is the name of the new CEO coming from ICBC. I think one of the things that I'll say to this is that I'm encouraged that the new CEO has worked with government, understands how the government operates. Formerly the head of ICBC, which I imagine he worked very closely with Premier David Eby when he was the Attorney General and responsible for ICBC.

Certainly they will be aware of each other. I think they'll be aware of the new board chair of BC Ferries, which was also involved in the ICBC situation. So there's a lot of familiarity there. I think that it is too early to be seeing results with this new CEO. Just in all fairness, you know, to get around and understand the system and understand how the office works is going to take some time. However, I was very encouraged this morning when I was coming over on the ferry

to read that he's taking a very much a people approach. And so getting back to the previous questions that you were asking with respect to people who need to get off the island for medical, when you have a system that is focused on the people that they're moving, and when I was talking to Minister of Transportation Rob Fleming about this BCNDP government's move a few years back to insert the public interest into decision making, this is very clearly an indication that this government and the corporation is going to be looking less at the profitability of the ferry service as

a corporation and much more as it being a corporation that's there to deliver service, transportation services for people and an economy. And so in that perspective, when the governance model changed originally, it was that, and the minister pointed this out in budget estimates in my exchange with him, that it was required that every single run, every single route be profitable. And of course, there's going to be lots of routes in a province, provincial wide ferry system on the coast, that those routes are never going to be profitable. And that's why we need the big routes to be able to provide revenue to support the smaller routes. And so we can see a definite shift away from the profit being the number one priority of,

you know, in the mind of the CEO of BC Ferries. I'm very pleased to hear that people are going to be at the center of that decision-making. And that means that I believe that that should mean that he'll be very sympathetic to the fact that these disruptions have consequences and very real consequences for people, especially in using the example that the government made of $500 million to help keep the cost down for my constituents and for people who need the ferries as a primary form of transportation. It was a good investment. I was very happy to support it. continue to work with this minister, Minister Fleming, who has a very, very strong grasp of the transportation needs in this province. And I find him to be very responsive to, in fact, he'll be coming and visiting the island to see the transportation needs that Salt Spring has in early May. So I'm quite encouraged by that and continue to work with them and continue to work

with the ferry system to ensure that it's delivering the service that Salt Spring Islanders need. Okay, well, thanks for popping in and talking to us today, Adam. It's been great. Thank you so much for the invitation. And I guess I should just say this is my first opportunity to be able to hang out in front of the microphone of Salt Spring Radio and congratulations. I know this has been a lot of hard work to get to where we're at today and it's encouraging to be surrounded by all of this vinyl and music and I'm really looking forward to the programming that you're going to be providing the constituency. Yeah thank you, we're very excited and should be on the air by the new year.

Thank you.