For Immediate Release
3 March, 2023
NL NDP Leader and MHA for St. John’s Centre, Jim Dinn, along with NDP MHAs for Labrador West and Torngat Mountains, Jordan Brown and Lela Evans, held a town hall in Labrador West this afternoon. They heard from constituents on issues they are facing in the region and launched the Stop the Bleeding Campaign.
“The residents of Labrador West shared with us their concerns about the future of their health care,” said Dinn. “They spoke about the lack of family doctors, access to publicly funded primary care, difficulties with MTAP, cancer diagnosis and treatment, the lack of healthcare services for seniors, and limited to access to specialists.”
At the town hall, NDP MHAs took the opportunity to launch the Stop the Bleeding campaign. People across the province can add their voice to a digital petition that calls on government to focus on retention of healthcare workers. 136,000 people in the province are without access to a primary care physician, and nursing vacancies increased 22% in six months. The campaign aims to bring awareness to government’s failure to address long-standing human resources issues in public healthcare that are causing employees to quit at an alarming rate.
“The provincial government has lost focus on the root of our healthcare crisis which is the failure to address long-standing human resources issues,” said Dinn. “Healthcare workers were promised a comprehensive human resources plan for health a year ago and we’ve yet to see the plan from government. Where is the plan?” Dinn said.
“Recruiting workers into a broken system that is losing public health staff sets the system up for perpetual failure. We need to stop the bleeding.”
Those interested in more information about the campaign can visit: https://nl.ndp.ca/stopthebleeding.
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For further information, contact Eddy St. Coeur, Director of Communications, NDP Caucus at 729-2137 (o), or eddystcoeur@gov.nl.ca