Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Nov 09/98) - Almost half of the beds in the Baffin Regional Hospital will remain closed, despite a new recruitment and retention plan tabled by the territorial minister of health in the legislative assembly last Thursday.

"I expect it will, in the long-term, produce results, but our problems are immediate," said Dennis Patterson, the chair of the Baffin regional health and social services board.

Designed by Health Minister Kelvin Ng to train, lure and keep nursing staff and other health care workers, Patterson said the plan was good in that it provided more than $3 million for education, but wouldn't solve the crucial nursing shortage.

Patterson insisted, however, that Ng, who has known about the impending crisis for at least six months, was doing everything he could to solve the situation.

"The Ministry has been working on it...but it's bigger than the Department of Health. It involves all the departments of the government," said Patterson, who maintained that ultimate responsibility for the crisis must be put on the union and the territorial government.

"Our problems are rooted in pay and benefits which are caught up in a complicated and possibly lengthy process."

He explained that until the Union of Northern Workers and the GNWT signed a new collective bargaining agreement, the board was legally unable to authorize an increase in the wage package.

The nursing shortage first showed itself more than a year ago when the board began to have difficulty hiring nurses to work in the community nursing stations.

Patterson announced less than two weeks ago that the problem had spread to the regional centre and that the board had to close 18 of the Iqaluit hospital's 34 beds. Many medical services which were formerly available in the region have now been devolved to Ottawa.