A doctor for Trepassey — what on earth is going on?

Hardly a day goes by without another story in the media about this province’s health care crisis. It is now estimated that at least 136,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador don’t have a family physician.

Particularly when it comes to the shortage of doctors, “recruitment and retention” are the buzzwords of the hour. Recently, in a case of potentially robbing Peter to pay Paul, Health Minister Tom Osborne lead a junket to Ireland to try and recruit doctors currently working in the Irish health system.

Even when viewed against this dire backdrop, the current situation in Trepassey is outstandingly bizarre.

Here, on one hand, you have a family physician, Dr. Heather Cuddy, with strong personal ties to the community, who worked at the clinic in Trepassey for three years and who wants to continue working there, combined with a public anxious to retain the services of an excellent doctor.

On the other hand, what should be a ‘no brainer’ retention scenario has run up against a group of health department and human resources bureaucrats, who appear to be doing everything in their power to prevent this outcome from occurring! As the British would say, one is left with the strong impression that these folks “couldn’t organise a booze-up in a brewery”.

In part, this peculiar situation is a reflection of systemic problems afflicting the province’s bloated administrative bureaucracy, whose defining characteristic is a culture of intense micromanagement. This leads to many middlelevel managers adopting three basic ‘principles’, namely: 1) don’t rock the boat;

2) cover your backside; and 3) try to avoid making decisions (as they could come back to bite you).

In addition, the province’s highly pedantic human resources hiring process involves obsessive box ticking and typically moves at a glacial pace.

Politicians come and go but bureaucrats endure. [For example, during my nine years as an N.L. public servant I worked under 10 different ministers.] Controlling the flow of information is a form of bureaucratic power and one has to wonder how much the health department executive have been told about the situation regarding Dr. Cuddy. Certainly, in a recent Zoom call with the Trepassey Town Council, Minister Osborne seemed less than well informed about the Trepassey doctor issue.

As you can imagine, Dr. Cuddy’s decision to speak to the media about her experience won her no friends at Eastern Health. After all, what sort of message does her treatment convey to doctors who might be considering working in Newfoundland and Labrador?

However, she is not alone in her frustration with the recruitment and retention process. On Oct. 19, 2022, CBC Investigates published additional complaints gleaned from over 200 pages of emails sent by doctors to the Premier’s office.

Early in his tenure, Minister Osborne made it clear that the government favoured recruiting nurse practitioners over family physicians because, presumably, they are regarded as a cheaper, quicker-fix option. Nevertheless, to state the obvious, despite their valuable contribution to the provision of health care, nurse practitioners are not, and cannot replace, family doctors. In the long run, having a doctor at the Trepassey clinic would be more efficient and cost effective and, much more importantly, would undoubtedly save some lives from being lost unnecessarily.

Two hundred and fifteen days have elapsed since a large crowd gathered in front of Trepassey’s Nurse Abernethy

Clinic and chanted “We want doctors, we want doctors.” It is long past time that the Department of Health answered their call. The citizens of the Trepassey-portugal Cove South-biscay Bay-st. Shott’s region and Dr. Cuddy deserve better than this.

On Jan. 26, Mr. Osborne was quoted as saying “….we’re focused on retention….”. Clearly, some of his departmental staff dealing with the Trepassey doctor file just haven’t got that message.

Surely, however, with a spirit of compromise and goodwill from both sides, it should be possible for Eastern Health to thrash out a new contract for Dr. Cuddy within a couple of weeks. Failing that, I can only hope that some enterprising journalist will submit an Access to Information request in order to shed some light on the decisions underpinning this travesty. Richard Thomas.

Portugal Cove South