The City of Prince Rupert will be hosting a meeting on Monday designed to bring a wide level of community action towards the growing list of Health Care concerns facing residents of the region, with the City set to host a number key stakeholders in the community for the session.
The call for some collective efforts came out of a City Council session in February where Councillor Nick Adey raised a number of concerns about how things were heading for Health care in the community .
February 28 -- Immediate focus for City of Prince Rupert Health initiative is to ensure that the PRRH Emergency Department remains open, always
Since then, as most all of us in the community are now aware, things have taken a rather sharp turn in the wrong direction, with a list of doctors set to depart the community in the next few months as well as the string of Emergency Room Closures put in place at Prince Rupert Regional Hospital during much of Spring Break last month.
The topic of health care made for one of a number of narratives for last night's Town Hall Forum on Civic infrastructure at the Lester Centre and Mayor Herb Pond did address the anxiety in the community on health care during that two hour community forum.
"Your council has taken some real active steps towards that, we've been on top of it and working with the MLA and working with Northern Health, meeting with Minister Dix.
And I'm sure it's a concern to you, but it's really not the focus of this evening.
We're actually going to be having a meeting on Monday where we're bringing together terminal operators and the port, First Nations and others to see how people who don't have a direct involvement in health care can influence the outcome"
He also expanded on the stakeholders plans, particularly following some concerns addressed to the city staff assembled on the stage, noting of the possibility of a declining population for Prince Rupert without the commitment to acceptable health care in the community.
"Listen, I hear you right and Council hears you, we were all over it, the potential Emergency Room closures back in January, because we were starting to hear the rumours. We thought that the worst thing that can happen quite frankly when I go to my wonderful population graph and wanting to go up.
There is eight hubs ... one of the key questions they ask is, you know what is the Health care like and so we thought that the worst thing that could happen, is that we would be that we were the ones to create the headline.
So we were doing it as best we could behind the scenes by putting pressure on, writing all the way up to the Premier and saying this thing looks like its coming and it looks like it's serious and the worst thing that can happen to Prince Rupert is we want to go up, is having any headline that says the Emergency Room in Prince Rupert is closed.
Well, you know regrettably it happened, it became public and it became a news story across the province and so you know I'm talking about purely us trying to get what we're trying to get done, done and the impact on that.
But then quite apart from that thee's the quite real life impact on people and that's unacceptable.
We cannot have Canada's third largest port being successful if there is not reliable round the clock emergency room access and family doctors available to people in Prince Rupert ...
But like I said on Monday morning, I've asked all First Nations, all terminal operators, I want the Port of Prince Rupert, I want to hear from people on the impact on their lives and the impact on their operations ...
We're not going to take over health care, but we want to strategize as to what we as a community can do by coming together whether it's around recruitment or whatever that may be, I don't know what the answer is going to be, it matters."
That exchange can be viewed from the City's Town Hall Forum video at 1 hour thirty one minutes from the video below:
More on Health Care in the community can be reviewed through our archive page here.
Cross posted from the North Coast Review.
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