Gatineau ER doctor declares Outaouais’ health care a “sinking ship”

Taylor Clark 

A Gatineau emergency room doctor is calling for Quebec to intervene in Outaouais’ dire health care situation.

“A lot of people are sort of waking up from their slumber of just accepting mediocre coverage of health care,” said Dr. Peter Bonneville, who also serves as the president of the conseil des Médecins, dentists et pharmaciens of the Centre intégré de santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais. “I hope that there will be a movement within the population to try to push politicians in Quebec to do something for us.”

Having practiced in the region for more than 30 years, Bonneville said Outaouais has been an area where maintaining health-care staff, mainly nurses and technicians, has historically been difficult due to the competition of the neighbouring province. This issue was only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the pandemic hit, the staffing shortage in the health-care sector was evident across the country but Bonneville said the region was already grappling with low staffing numbers.

“We went from a situation that was barely manageable to right now, a situation where we’re pretty much just trying to avert crisis after crisis,” he said.

With the imminent departure of three radiology technicians from the Hull Hospital, Bonneville said the ship was “pretty much sinking.”

The Hull Hospital’s operation room was staffed at 43 per cent and hoped to achieve adequate staffing for the summer months. The Gatineau Hospital was in more dire straits, with its surgical unit staffed at 29 per cent. With summer vacation around the corner, the hospital was working on contingency plans to have only one of its seven operating rooms running 24 hours per day, which Bonneville expected to only increase the long wait time for elective surgeries and put the sole obstetrics centre at risk.

“If there are two emergencies at the same time, there may be issues with potentially having people’s lives in danger.”

The reason behind the departures was a salary difference of $30,000 to provide their services on the other side of the river, said Bonneville.

Along with the conseil, all department heads at the Centre intégré de santé et des services sociaux de l’Outaouais, the Département régionale de médecine générale and the Association des médecins omnipraticiens de l’Ouest du Québec urged the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, to not abandon the region and “stop the hemorrhage of departures to other provinces.”

“We pay as many taxes as people in all the other regions of Quebec and we are allowed to have as good of healthcare as the other people of the province have.”

The Minister of Health was not the only politician in the hot seat. Another petition by the Syndicat des professionnelles en soins de l’Outaouais called upon Mathieu Lacombe, MP for Papineau and Minister responsible for the Outaouais region, to “exercise his leadership to ensure patients in (the) region get the care and services they deserve.”

“The government’s bad decisions compromise access to quality, safe, and free health care for the entire population of the region,” read the petition.

Already seeing the downward trends in health care, Bonneville said the conseil made the region’s health care an issue for the 2022 Quebec general election. All local candidates were met with and briefed on the worsening situation in September 2022.

“Things have not changed since then and, as predicted, we’ve been losing more people,” said Bonneville.

But Ontario’s pay bump was not the only factor contributing to Outaouais’ current health-care crisis. According to data from the Ministry of Health and Social Services obtained by the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques under a freedom of information request,  Outaouais surpassed the rest of the province in terms of privatization of surgeries since the summer of 2020.

Researcher Anne Plourde noted the enormous increase in surgeries carried out in the private sector came at the detriment of the public sector. The number of surgeries at private clinics jumped from 46 in 2020-2021 to 6,601 in 2022-2023, a 14,250 per cent increase. This made Outaouais the region of Quebec that experienced the greatest increase in the number of surgeries performed in private clinics during this period, representing a third of the increase across Quebec.

Plourde pointed the finger back at the Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux for delegating thousands of surgeries to private clinics, ultimately contributing to the crisis it was currently experiencing.

“It constitutes a true textbook case for the privatization of surgeries in Quebec and, as we will now see, it also represents a warning of what risks happening at the provincial level if the government continues in this harmful way,” wrote Plourde. 

Photo caption: The critical staffing situation at the Gatineau Hospital has left the centre of care with only one of its seven operating rooms available this summer.

Photo credit: Change.org petition by Peter Bonneville