Quote:
Originally Posted by mmmatt
I can never stop imagining what Moncton downtown would have been like if we had 1 Large Billingual 800 Bed Hospital here instead of 2 "medium" sized 400 bed facilities a few blocks away from each other....
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Yes that is a very good question……
Supposedly, (at least from what I heard from older doctors at the Moncton Hospital when I first came to work here), when the idea of building a new GDH (to replace the old Hotel Dieu) was first floated 50 years or so ago, the proposal was to build a
single massive hospital (a la SJRH) to replace
both the Hotel Dieu and the Moncton Hospital.
This hospital would have had an anglophone tower and a francophone tower, connected by a "services" wing where common facilities like medical imaging, surgical suites and the lab would have been located. This made perfect sense, but the Acadian elite at the time put the kibosh to this as they felt that the de facto working language of such a combined facility would have been English and this was (to them) entirely unacceptable. As such, a separate GDH was built and the current medical duality in Moncton came into being.
Duality is now a de facto (if not de jure) reality in Moncton (and in NB), and is supported by the current dual health care region model. Horizon (anglophone) and Vitalite (francophone) gives a legitimacy and structure to the de facto duality and has created two competing health care silos in the province. There is precious little communication between the two authorities (let alone cooperation).
I'm of the opinion that the only way around the impasse, and the only way that the two medical communities in the city won't feel threatened by the other, would be to create a new
third health care region in NB tasked to deal with the unique challenges of the southeastern portion of the province. By having a third health care authority, this would also somewhat delegitimize the concept of de facto provincial health care duality (how can you have duality if there are
three health care authorities
).
This new third authority would have jurisdiction over
both the GDH and TMH, and would be tasked with proportioning health care resources between the two existing hospitals in Moncton. The Moncton Hospital would continue to work in English and the GDH would continue to operate in French. Bilingual services would be available in both facilities, and tertiary care services would be provided in the hospital which has the most expertise (e.g. oncology at the GDH and neurosciences at the Moncton Hospital). A careful balance would have to be maintained between the two facilities so that neither one feels threatened. By having a combined unified structure however, the new Southeast Health Care Authority would be able to compete on a level playing field with the common enemy (the SJRH). The city of Moncton would end up a winner and neither linguistic community should feel threatened.
Of course I do tend to live in a dream world. This will never happen…….
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