Vitalité unable to deploy more primary health care teams due to lack of funds

The Vitalité Health Network says it is unable to set up more primary health care teams due to a lack of funding from the government.

Currently, there are 12 teams made up of 153 family doctors, 17 nurse practitioners and 45 other health professionals, according to the Network’s latest community report, released Tuesday.

These teams located throughout the territory have accepted 14,000 orphan patients, or nearly half of Vitalité’s patients who are without doctors, and have made it possible to reduce waiting times from twelve to eight days to obtain primary care, according to CEO network assistant, Patrick Parent.

He assures that 14 other teams were being formed with enough interest from doctors to eventually create 20.

Unfortunately, we have currently reached the budget ceiling allocated to us by the government and we will have to pause the deployment of any new teams.explained Patrick Parent.

The communities that are seeing the deployment of new or additional teams put on hold are in Moncton-Dieppe, Saint-Quentin, Grand-Saut, Kent County and Caraquet, according to the CEO adjoint.

Disparity in amounts claimed

Vitalité had requested $56 million to be able to properly deploy across the entire network these teams but the provincial government only provided 13 million, according to Patrick Parent.

The spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Sean Hatchard, assured that the health authority had only claimed 20 million, and not 56 million as it claims. He confirmed that an envelope of 13 million was provided.

Vitalité could not be reached to explain this difference in amounts.

Vitalité calls for additional funding

Last week, Vitalité and the Ministry of Health met to provide in-depth analysis of the return on investment of the program.

The Health Ministry says it had been trying to get information from primary health care teams for months.

The government has a procedure for reviewing requests for additional funding that arise during the fiscal year. When such a request is made, it is important that it is accompanied by information demonstrating the impact of the investmenthe said in an emailed statement.

The ministry received a significant demand additional funding from Vitalité on June 21 which is currently being examined.

Based on a report by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon, CBC