Summerside mayor tackles health-care concerns with town hall
CBC
The mayor of Summerside hosted a town hall on Wednesday night, giving residents the chance to speak with some of P.E.I.'s top health officials.
"The conversation so often is driven by responses to crises," said Mayor Dan Kutcher.
"I wanted to make sure that we are optimistic and hopeful and see a path forward ... and understand what the vision is for the future of health-care services in our community."
There is a shortage of medical professionals all across P.E.I.. In Summerside, concerns have been raised recently following news that two internal medicine physicians would be leaving the Prince County Hospital (PCH).
Earlier this month, the hospital was also without anesthesia services for about a week.
"I'm worried. I'm concerned, and I think we all should be to a degree," said Kutcher.
"If I wasn't, I wouldn't be doing this."
The room at the Credit Union Centre was packed full, with about 180 people in attendance including the CEO of Health P.E.I., the minister of health and wellness and the PCH medical director.
There was the occasional laugh as the PCH medical director shared his all-too-familiar tale of "I married an Islander," when asked why he is a doctor in the province. But for the most part, the crowd was silent while listening to Health P.E.I. CEO Dr Michael Gardam.
"The big elephant in the room is we need more people," Gardam told the audience.
"We historically have had the oldest doctors in Canada ... We are seeing enormous numbers of retirements, and again the pandemic was the final straw."
There are other things to take into consideration as well, he said. For example, when an older doctor leaves more than one younger doctor tends to be needed to cover that individual's workload. There is also the fact that P.E.I. is a smaller province, making recruitment more difficult. For Summerside in particular, there is what he called the "awkward size" of the PCH.
"If you only have three of a type of doctor and one doctor leaves, you've lost 33 per cent of your doctors," said Gardam.
"So we don't need to shrink services at Prince County Hospital, we need to grow them ... Prince County Hospital can never ever ever close. The whole province would collapse if Prince County Hospital closed."
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.
Montreal's St. Patrick's Day parade first started on Saint-Paul Street in 1824, and a couple centuries later, this annual tradition is still going strong.
A congregation in Carman, Man., is coming to grips with the loss of their Anglican Lutheran church, a fixture in the community that was ravaged by a fire on Thursday.