NATAROS: Building our common healthy future

For a time I worked in midwifery—sitting babies and assisting with cesareans—in the Mennonite communities of Morden-Winkler in southern Manitoba.

The two communities, which share a common region, are separated by a 25-minute drive and united halfway through the Boundary Trails Health Center: a hospital at the intersection of Highways 3 and 14.

Sounds like a familiar story?

One of my mentors and heroes, Dr. Granger Avery, recipient of the Order of Canada and retired doctor from Port McNeill, has long called for a centralized hospital for our North Island. dr Avery started or played a key role in all of BC’s leading rural health organizations

dr Avery knows what he’s talking about. We have to go to Dr. Avery hear.

Yet somehow, instead of heeding the suggestions of experienced physicians past and present in our North Island communities, we instead have a faltering North Island healthcare system run by Central/South Vancouver Island.

It confuses me.

A recent $30 million announcement to help address our North Island health crisis splattered the pages of this newspaper and caught media attention across BC. They even announced the possible launch of a mobile CT scanner. Funny because I don’t know a single North Island doctor who said we need a CT scanner in the North Island.

CT scans don’t order themselves, and if doctors don’t call for a CT scanner, who will? It may be politically prominent, but it doesn’t immediately improve our ability to care for patients. I would rather be able to order complete blood counts on my patients while I work overnight in an emergency in Port McNeil and be able to rule out appendicitis or pancreatitis. But that’s just me. And all my medical colleagues.

I guess our opinions don’t matter to the leadership of Island Health. And we wonder why we are losing so many doctors and abandoning our North Island community, which is besieged by a revolving door of doctors wanting to leave when their term is up.

We can do better. We have to do better. We have unelected officials who are currently not being held accountable even though they have neglected their duties and continued to harass North Island doctors. But we also have elected officials – Mayor/Council, MLA, MP, Prime Minister and Secretary of Health – who are accountable to us. And they can hold these unelected bureaucrats accountable.

Let’s build our common healthy future together.

For ideas/topics you would like to explore, please email suggestions to: [email protected] or find me online on Facebook/Twitter “Alex Nataros MD”. Call 8-11.

dr Alex Nataros lives in Port Hardy and writes bi-weekly for the North Island Gazette

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