'Process failed' in travel-nurse contracts, former PC health minister says

A former provincial health minister in the Progressive Conservative government says key failures at the heart of the costly travel-nurse contracts may need more investigation.

Progressive Conservative MLA Dorothy Shephard made the comments Tuesday during the first of three days of hearings by the legislature's public accounts committee.

She told Eric Beaulieu, the deputy minister at the Health Department, that she was struck by how many invoices were paid to private travel-nurse companies without proper documentation of services being delivered. 

"Process is what protects everybody," Shephard said. "I think one of the big concerns with the auditor general's report is that somehow, process failed.

"It didn't just fail in one sector. It failed over three separate entities, and that's cause for a little bit of concern, I think, and maybe even more investigation."

Beaulieu was the deputy minister of social development when that department signed a contract with Canadian Health Labs Inc. for travel nurses in long-term care in early 2022.

He became deputy minister of health on June 30, 2022, just 29 days before the first of three travel-nurse contracts was signed between the Vitalité health authority and Canadian Health Labs, a private company.

Beaulieu said the system was under severe staffing pressures at the time "and obviously shortcuts were done" in the accounts payable process.

Shephard acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was creating widespread staff shortages but argued this ought not to have affected how bills were paid.

"I can easily understand the need to get bodies to the front line," said the Saint John Lancaster MLA, who is not running again in this year's election. "That's a really easy no-brainer.

"But the process for paying invoices is usually pretty much the same, day in and day out. That's why I'm concerned about that failure in process."

Shephard's comments at the committee are her first public remarks on the travel-nurse controversy since Auditor General Paul Martin released a scathing audit on the contracts earlier this month.

She turned down a request from reporters to elaborate during a break in Tuesday's committee session.

Martin's audit reported that: