While Northern Health is continuing to investigate a consultant’s recommendation to move to a hub-and-spoke model for healthcare in the Northwest, Northern Health’s chief operating officer for the Northwest Health Services Delivery Area says the organization is committed to keeping surgical and specialty services at the Prince Rupert Regional Hospital.
“We are clear that for Prince Rupert, given the size of its population and the outlying communities Prince Rupert serves including Haida Gwaii, there is a core set of services that are required now and into the future. There is no question a surgical program will remain in Prince Rupert and those services need to include obstetrics, gynaecology, general surgery and internal medicine,” said Penny Anguish, noting that maintaining those services goes beyond just the medical options offered in Prince Rupert.
“We know that if we don’t sustain that type of surgical program in Prince Rupert, that has some effects on the ability to keep a very adequate general practice and family physician population. If they don’t have a certain level of backup, that changes who is willing to come to a community. The physicians have been very clear about that with us.”
A reduction of surgical services in Prince Rupert may be off the table, but the idea of moving to a hub-and-spoke model presented in a surgical services review prepared by a third party consultant is one Northern Health’s executive is continuing to examine.
“It wasn’t surprising that hub and spoke came up in that review because it is a fairly commonly used model in other jurisdictions. Northern Health hasn’t used that model as a normal approach to managing how we organize services … It has been interpreted as everything goes to the hub while the spokes do much less and that doesn’t have to be the case,” said Anguish, who added that other recommendations in the report related to service improvements have already been implemented.
“The contentious recommendation is the one for a hub and spoke model … that recommendation has been clearly marked in documents outside of the organization and internally stating that [it] would be investigated further, along with some consultation … we don’t have a firm timeline. The framework for how we would proceed with looking at that one needs some more discussion regarding how we would do the consultation and what the investigation would mean.”
Anguish said Northern Health continues to discuss with staff how to further investigate the model.
