The private sector in health care: panacea or bad idea?

The private sector’s role in health care was on everyone’s lips during the election campaign, but given the widely diverging opinions, there was no clear understanding of how that might be interpreted. François Legault said he wanted to accelerate the “migration” of primary care services to family medicine groups (GMFs) and give private clinics more latitude in specialized care. Dominique Anglade wanted a major push to clear the surgery backlog, through agreements with the private sector. Eric Duhaime bluntly questioned the basic principle of keeping public and private health care separate. And Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois tersely commented that if private health care worked, we’d know about it.

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Gearing up for a hectic fall

The APTS is set for a busy fall. With the fourth wave, professionals and technicians will once again come under excessive pressure, and our health and social services system will be forced to do a major juggling act just to maintain non-COVID-related care and services. As well, our union will be holding special general assemblies to present you with the government’s global offer that we received at the beginning of the summer.

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Services for seniors require urgent improvement

As the second wave surges, we urgently need to learn from last spring’s events in order to prevent a grim repeat of the death tolls witnessed among our elders. That’s why we responded to the call issued by the QuĂ©bec Ombudsman (Protecteur du citoyen) in its investigation into the management of the COVID-19 crisis in CHSLDs.

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