VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - The B.C. NDP says the Liberals are missing a deep source of health care savings in nurse practitioners that can be tapped today. They say NPs can handle many routine medical duties, but many sit unemployed or go somewhere else for work.
The NPD's health critic says the Liberals got it right when they created programs at B.C. universities to train NPs, but they got it wrong by not hiring them. That allowed them to be recruited by other provinces like Ontario.
Eighty-eight B.C. nurse practitioners trained here don't have jobs, and the NDP says those nurses could deliver over 300,000 primary care visits per year.
Linda Olson's Abbotsford nurse practitioner has recently been laid off and she's missing the extra time and specialized help she was getting. "She knows what I like to do. She knows that I'm not good on prescriptions so we look for alternatives. If I need a test done to get to the bottom of things, we get the test done. We get the results."
The NDP says the NPs can be put to work right away, if the bureaucratic funding red tape can be removed.