Frequently Asked Questions

The health of our healthcare system fundamentally comes down to the health of our healthcare workers.
Without them, we do not have a healthcare system.

At the local level, what we can do is try to help them reduce their costs and stressors, and do what we can to help them meet their needs and have a decent quality of life — so they stay in our community and continue to serve us.

While the healthcare budget may be in the billions, that doesn’t help a nurse or a medical office assistant who can’t afford housing near where she works, or to pay gas costs and parking tickets or find childcare for her children over a night shift. And she may actually have to leave our community over those issues — regardless of what is happening in any
Health Ministry, Department, or Authority.

These “small things” are actually “big things” to our healthcare workers.
And we CAN do something about these things at our local level.

We are going to identify and focus on some of the key things that will really help make a difference for our healthcare workers, and that we can get local support and take action on, including:

Housing Costs
Transportation and Parking
Childcare
General Living Costs
Personal Wellbeing and Support
and others

We want the Province to provide some funding to supplement the Saunders Family Foundation’s seed money, which will enable us to build a Game Plan and Toolbox for local communities to use — so every community does not have to reinvent the wheel.  We want to be able to provide a basic Playbook for each group in a community to guide them through the actions they can take, and tools to help them do it, to support their community’s healthcare workers.

We will work with existing community leaders and organizations so they can organize and manage programs — such as the municipality, the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Lions Club, Hospital Foundations, businesses, developers, and all the other great community organizations we have.

Together we have an enormous amount of capacity — we just need to harness it and point it
in the right direction to help our healthcare workers.

Some of what we will try will work and will have a big impact.  And some things will have a big impact in one place, but maybe less in another.

Some things will not work as planned, and we’ll learn and change them.
The problems remain and we’ll have to find other solutions if our first ideas don’t work.
JUST LIKE EVERYTHING IN LIFE!!

There are deep structural challenges in our healthcare system that we at the local level cannot have a lot of impact on.
But many of the challenges we face today are related to the physical, mental, and
emotional health of our healthcare workers.
We CAN help them with issues that impact their stress or wellbeing — and that helps change the
culture of healthcare in our communities — and that will also help future healthcare workers as well.

We can do this while the Province and the Feds get to work fixing the larger problems.

We are facing a crisis with our healthcare workers NOW, and we need a strategy, Game Plan, and Toolkit to
begin to help them immediately, so we don’t lose them one by one, day by day.
Big structural issues take time to fix, like billing systems, seats in medical schools, time to train workers, and many others. But other things we can move on right now at the local level.

If our actions can help keep a family doctor or a nurse or any other healthcare worker from leaving our community this year, then we buy time to enable the bigger problems to be solved.

And some of the problems our healthcare workers are facing are not short-term — they are the new permanent reality.
Our new normal may include entrenched high housing prices, expensive education, mass retirements due to demographics, trends in career choice, high energy costs, and others.
To respond to the “new normal”, we now need to add the health of our healthcare workers as a core policy priority in every community and use our local resources and capacity to help them going forward.

… or we risk losing them.

We all want a stable and secure healthcare system and healthy healthcare workers to support our family when we need them.  By supporting this project, we increase the probability our healthcare workers will stay and continue in our community to serve us.

We are starting a pilot project now in the West Shore and we hope to be able to build this Playbook and Toolbox of initiatives in the next year so we can provide straightforward resources you can use in your neighbourhood and community to help keep your healthcare workers strong.