On Sunday, the new Santé Québec agency officially took off. The “top gun” Geneviève Biron, from the cozy inner circle of the Biron private laboratories, is the pilot.
Responsible for the “operations” of the health network with its 330,000 employees, Santé Québec also becomes the largest employer in the country. This is the final phase of years of centralization while the best health systems in the West are the most decentralized.
Nor do we detect any targeted concern for social services. However, they are essential to the well-being of a population as aging as ours.
On the board of directors, no general practitioner either, while family medicine carries the “first line” at arm’s length.
The creation of Santé Québec is above all an acknowledgment of failure for the Ministry of Health and Social Services.
How can we explain that such a vast ministry with an annual budget of $60 billion is incapable of “operating” itself an accessible, quality and humane health system?
No room for error
Quebec is also the only province where entirely private services are mushrooming. They are growing because our governments see the private sector as a complement to the public when, in fact, it undermines it.
Result: our health system multiplies “speeds”, according to patients’ income and not their needs. A real fool’s bargain.
Meanwhile, Minister Dubé, certainly in good faith, is multiplying the “dashboards”. Duty reports that those close to him nicely describe him as a “numbers bugger.”
These tables, however, have the unfortunate flaw of measuring “performance” in quantitative and not qualitative terms.
Until we are offered robots in place of doctors, nurses and social services, health is first and foremost a human affair. And in doing so, quality of care.
Dehumanization
Humans whose job it is to take care of other humans during difficult times in their lives. However, the Public Protector recently denounced the growing dehumanization of the public network.
If Santé Québec does not take major measures to reinstill humanity into it, we are not out of the woods.
However, with the order to cut up to $1.5 billion from the public network – Ms. Biron’s “mission”, it seems – it seems like a perfect storm.
That of yet another mixing of structures imposed at the same time as the network is forced to tighten its belt. Translation: direct services to the population are suffering.
This storm is reminiscent of that of the Couillard-Barrette duo with their centralizing reforms against a backdrop of budgetary austerity. The return of the same combination does not bode well.
As the father of Santé Québec, the Legault government will, however, have no room for error in the next elections.
The new Pallas-Qc125-L’Actuality poll shows that 53% of Quebecers want to see Prime Minister François Legault resign before the 2026 elections.
Growing anger against an increasingly dysfunctional health system is surely one of the main reasons.
