Opposition calls on Nova Scotia government to create women’s health task force

The Nova Scotia NDP is calling for a taskforce examining women’s health-care services.

Nova Scotia NDP leader Claudia Chender is adamant women aren’t getting the health care they deserve. She has called on the provincial government to strike up a task force to look at improving women’s health care across the province.

“Seventy per cent of women in the Maritimes believe that their health-care needs are not being met by the current system,” said Chender, the leader of the opposition, quoting an IWK Foundation survey published in October.

Chender says women deserve better and are concerned by spending cuts in the PC party’s budget that impact women’s health – like the 20 per cent or $604,000 cut from the IWK’s Health Transformation Workforce Strategy and the more than $300,000 cut to addictions and mental health funding around trauma informed care related to recommendations from the Mass Casualty Commission.

“We also have cuts to social work, we have cuts to community organizations, and I think all cuts impact women and gender diverse people in this province,” said Chender.

Michelle Thompson, the minister of health and wellness, understands there’s more work to do around women’s health. She says the government is making strategic investments, but adds they won’t be introducing any strategies or taskforces at this time.

“Perhaps at one point a strategy will come, but right now it’s about investing in people, investing in the equipment that we need and really trying to build an ecosystem on the ground,” said Thompson.

As for the 20 per cent cut to the workforce grant, Thompson says that relates to modernizing human resources and not women’s health.

“It’s really around mentorship and orientation but otherwise we are heavily investing,” said Thompson.

The Department of Health and Wellness did cut 14 full-time equivalent positions and $2.9 in grant spending, which are reductions for the most part and don’t include complete funding cuts.

Thompson said each decision was considered carefully while working to protect all frontline employees wherever possible and to minimize the impacts to Nova Scotians.

Jane Archibald was one of several women who spoke at the NDP press conference regarding women’s health and shared her ongoing journey with chemo therapy for stage-three breast cancer.

The 49-year-old is advocating for earlier ultrasound and MRI screening for patients with dense breasts, as routine mammograms didn’t pick up her cancer and says if she lived in Alberta or Ontario she would have access to better screening.

“This is a major gap in women’s health care,” said Archibald. “I have had over a year of costly treatments, and I am not done yet.”

Archibald just came from a morning chemotherapy treatment and believes the NDP’s call for a health-care task force makes sense. She believes investing in women’s health and early preventative care saves money in the long run.

“My cancer has been a huge cost to the government and had it been caught two or three years ago it would have been much less,” she said.

The NDP’s bill to establish a women’s health-care task force would need the support of the PC government to move forward.

Last week the Liberals introduced a similar bill aimed at setting up a women’s health strategy to identify gaps in care to create a plan and add a level of accountability.

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