- Build ten more Urgent Primary Care Centres.
- Expand Primary Care Networks to deliver more personalized and coordinated care.
- Launch the Hospital at Home program to expand e-health and tele-health services so people can get virtual visits from doctors and nurses at home.
- Build and modernize more hospitals and additions.
- Use the rural collaborative framework to deliver more immediate and culturally safe care closer to home.
- Move housekeeping and dietary hospital workers back into the public service.
- Prioritize the hiring of a healthcare workforce that better represents the communities it serves.
- Maximize the capacity of existing surgical and diagnostic space to reduce wait times.
- Add four more MRI machines in the areas of highest demand: Ridge Meadows Hospital, Langley Memorial, Vancouver General, and St. Paul’s.
- Utilize enhanced training, recruitment, certification and retention strategies to provide the hospital staff needed to perform more surgeries and other procedures.
- Launch a second medical school to graduate more doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.
- Create a comprehensive healthcare human resources strategy including credential recognition.
- Ensure that long-term care remains robust, well-funded, and able to quickly respond to a crisis.
- Hire 7,000 new health care workers in long-term care and assisted living.
- Develop a staffing retention strategy for long-term care and assisted living facilities that levels-up wages and restores provincial standards for wages, benefits, and working conditions.
- Work with non-profits to build public care homes that keep seniors safer, healthier, and more comfortable.
- Ensure that private long-term care operators are more transparent and accountable for the public funding they receive.
- Expand publicly funded home care to provide better care and help with daily living so that people can stay in their own homes for as long as is safely possible.
- Launch a Silver Alert system to help assist first responders locate missing seniors, particularly those with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
- Launch a 10-year cancer care action plan based around: an anywhere/anytime commitment so that all cancer care patients get information and care when they need it, including in rural communities; providing more individualized care for cancer patients, including dedicated teams providing a full continuum of care; improving that continuum of care by investing in new equipment, systems and procedures that deliver leading-edge prevention, screening, diagnosis and treatment services; and expanding and funding enhanced research and diagnostic capabilities. to improve the precision of disease risk prediction, prevention, diagnostics, and treatment.
- Fight for a national pharmacare program while enhancing Fair Pharmacare by reviewing cost thresholds and drug eligibility with the goal of bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
- Make prescription contraception free.
- Scale up BC’s response to the opioid crisis by focusing on prevention, harm reduction, safe prescription medications, treatment, and recovery.
- Crack down on the toxic drug supply by taking down distributors, as well as exploring new ways to help prescribers separate more people from the toxic drug supply through safe prescription alternatives.
- Work with police chiefs to push Ottawa to decriminalize simple possession of small amounts of illicit drugs for personal use, or develop a made-in-BC solution that will help save lives.
- Work in partnership with WorkSafeBC to identify new ways of improving pain management practices for injured workers, and mandate WorkSafeBC to provide treatment on demand to those with chronic pain as a result of workplace injuries.
- Expand the availability of treatment beds for people by building new treatment, recovery, detox, and after-care facilities across BC, including in communities with an expressed need such as Maple Ridge, with some beds specifically for British Columbians under the age of 24.
- Step up oversight of recovery homes and other private treatment providers to ensure quality care, accountability, and value for money.
- Focus new mental health initiatives on kids and young adults.
- Develop Complex Care housing to provide an increased level of support – including more access to nurses and psychiatrists – for BC’s most vulnerable who need more intensive care than supportive housing provides, including in places like the Riverview lands in Coquitlam.
- Expand access to counselling by investing in e-health and other technologies, while reducing counselling costs for people in rural and remote communities.
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- Continue to work with all parties and Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, in a collaborative manner, to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Ensure free influenza vaccines for all British Columbians, to help reduce the burden on the medical system.
- Improve patient care by establishing more Primary Care Networks and Community Health Centres.
- Learn from the pandemic to train the health work force of the future, including family doctors, nurse practitioners, and other allied primary health care workers as needed.
- Expand opportunities for international graduates in health professions to work in BC.
- Work to attract health professionals to under-serviced areas.
- Improve access to medical care by encouraging practice networks and innovative practice models.
- Improve BC Ambulance Service response times for patients, particularly in smaller and rural communities.
- Work in partnership with the Province of Alberta to improve access to care for British Columbians whose nearest local health services are in Alberta.
- Institute necessary system improvements to ensure all healthcare workers experience a violence-free workplace.
- Increase online booking of medical appointments to reduce wait times and improve convenience for patients.
- Improve public reporting of wait times, and reduce wait times for surgical procedures, by accelerating the implementation of electronic surgical-waitlist management tools.
- Accelerate the adoption of virtual medical consultations with doctors and nurse practitioners to reduce COVID-19 backlogs and reduce wait times for referrals.
- Work with doctors and pharmacies to expand online prescription-renewals, with optional home delivery.
- Increase the number of nurses in BC hospitals trained to conduct medical and forensic exams for sexual assault.
- Work to eliminate systemic racism and unconscious bias across the healthcare system, and to ensure services are equitable and accessible for all, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or any other form of discrimination.
- Invest an additional $1 billion over 5 years in long-term care homes, to replace and upgrade ageing facilities.
- Work to ensure that every senior in long-term care who wants one has a private room, and decommission multi-bed wards.
- Implement a new Seniors’ Home Care Tax Credit, which provides seniors with a tax credit of up to $7,000 per year for up to $20,000 worth of housekeeping, home repairs, and supportive care.
- Expand programs to assist seniors and people with disabilities with home renovations, including reinstating the Home Adaptations for Independence grant program.
- Launch and ensure a truly independent review of the response to COVID-19 in long-term care and assisted living homes.
- Implement measures to enable family members to safely visit seniors living in long-term care, assisted and independent living residences during the COVID-19 pandemic, to bring residents comfort and companionship.
- Work with home care operators to address chronic worker shortages and improve the quality of care.
- Improve home-care visits and supports for seniors living in their own homes.
- Increase the supply of fully-accessible units for seniors and persons with disabilities, in newly built multi-unit residential buildings.
- Work to eliminate ageism and unconscious bias across government, to ensure all services are free of discrimination against seniors.
- Treat seniors fairly by covering the costs of exams the province requires drivers to complete every two years, beginning at age 80.
- Offer seniors and their families a free central registry to provide Advanced Care Plans and related documents for elder care.
- Increase addiction-treatment and recovery programs, and ensure that those who need help getting off drugs have a clear pathway to treatment.
- Clearly recognize that addiction is a medical disorder, and ensure a focus on public health and safety in the treatment of people suffering from addictions.
- Increase mental health supports in public secondary schools, such as registered psychiatric nurses.
- Introduce a Safe Care Act to safely and ethically help young people with addictions into treatment.
- End the funding discrimination that continues to disqualify abstinence-based treatment programs.
- Implement a provincial prescription-drug monitoring program to prevent addiction with early referrals to specialist care and treatment options.
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- Continue the roll-out of primary care networks in BC to expand accessibility of healthcare services, while increasing the number of British Columbians with a family doctor.
- Develop a proposal to implement an essential drugs program beginning in 2022, designed to reduce the costs of prescription drugs and ensure the cost of drugs is not a barrier to health management.
- Establish a task force to develop a plan to transition the balance of resources between acute care and preventative care. The task force will review the funding and range of services covered by the health care system to ensure the mix of services better meets the treatment and prevention needs of the population.
- Consult with physicians and other stakeholders to improve efficiency, reduce administration, and incentivize becoming a General Practitioner.
- Work with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia to create a pathway for qualified foreign-trained physicians to practice in BC.
- Begin to shift the long-term care sector away from a for-profit private company model to a mix of public, non-for-proft, community based services and co-ops.
- Ensure that public funding is only being used to support direct care for seniors, and enhance accountability by requiring annual inspections, financial statements and audited expense reports.
- Establish caregivers as a recognized healthcare profession with the salary they deserve.
- Support pilot projects that bring young people and seniors together and integrate seniors more deeply into communities.
- Give the Office of the Seniors Advocate more independence and an expanded mandate.
- Invest to build an affordable and accessible mental healthcare system where cost is not a barrier to seeking help.
- Allocate $1 billion over a four-year cycle to address mental health care within the medical servies plan.
- Establish accessible mental health treatment options for all those struggling with anxiety or depression.
- Establish early intervention, youth mental health initiatives, and integrated primary care specific to youth and mental health enabling families to easily navigate resources in a supportive environment.
- Create community-based options for responding to those who need mental healthcare and their families, such as Clubhouse International.
- Enhance counselling outreach services, to work with the homeless community.
- Allocate $200 million per year to invest in facilities to provide mental healthcare services and community-based centres for mental health and rehabilitation.
- Accelerate capital plans for the construction of tertiary care facilities and detoxification beds while protecting operating funding for facilities.
- Develop and implement a Loneliness Strategy.
- Conduct a public information campaign to increase awareness and provide information on where to get help.
- Work with the colleges of physicians and pharmacists to encourage their members to participate in existing programs.
- Fund a wider range of safe supply resources, including low-barrier ways of dispensing.
- Develop ongoing consultation with people who use drugs in order to create low-barrier and accessible programs.
- Enhance funding for harm reduction services and create COVID-friendly plans to ensure people have access and don’t use alone.
- De-prioritize policing of simple possession through implementing Dr. Bonnie Henry’s recommended amendments to the Police Act.
- Strongly pursue decriminalization with the Federal government for BC.
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- Review all aspects of healthcare policy, service and delivery, with an eye toward opportunities for increased efficiency and toward developing mechanisms to ensure healthcare decisions are made in the best interests of patients and taxpayers, based on population and demographics, cost effectiveness, and patient outcomes.
- Support the basic principles of the Canada Health Act of Universality, including accessibility, comprehensiveness, and portability, with the full understanding that the delivery of healthcare is a provincial responsibility in accordance with the Constitution of Canada.
- Support the principles of public accountability and transparency in the delivery of healthcare services and ensure healthcare boards reflect regional population distribution and take into account the local and regional health care needs.
- Ensure healthcare funding is focused on the best interests of patients and patient care, above all other interests.
- Support the concept of a strong publicly-funded health system as the primary facilitator of healthcare services in British Columbia.
- Ensure that all British Columbians have access to quality care, regardless of their ability to pay.
- Support the principle that the citizens of British Columbia need to have input into the type of healthcare system they want.
- Study other healthcare systems worldwide to look for ways to improve our own, including ways to reduce increasing wait times.
- Develop objectives and quality indicators to assess how effectively healthcare is being delivered.
- Support and recognize the benefits of formal and informal caregivers and long-term care for patients at home.<./li>
- Recognize the increasing burden of chronic illness and supporting initiatives for better care of these patients resulting in fewer complications, lower cost and better quality of life.
- Support and recognize the benefits of community care facilities as well as including the Community Health Representative program, particularly for services in rural areas.
- Support the development of an efficient and affordable mental health and addiction initiative for British Columbians.
- Support strategies that allow medications to be purchased at the lowest costs possible.
- Support the digitization of all patient data and implementation of a province-wide medical electronic health record system and making such records accessible to the individual, while ensuring the utmost confidentiality.
- Support a primary care delivery system that involves a multi-disciplinary team approach.
- Appropriate recognition and funding of palliative care, so that British Columbians can have meaningful choice when making end-of-life decisions.
- Hospices should have the right to opt out of providing medical assistance in dying, where it may conflict with their principles that death should not be hastened.
- Eliminate parking fees for patients and patient visitors at all public hospitals.
- Support the principle of stable transparent funding of healthcare and that the provincial and federal governments should cooperate in the management of healthcare.
- Recognize the rising demand for healthcare in BC will require additional funding or a reduction of services if sufficient savings cannot be found through more effective utilization of existing resources.
- Provide flexibility in the delivery of health services, including consideration of a balance of public and private options, in consultation with British Columbians.
- Ensure full transparency by requiring regional healthcare authorities to publish, annually, a breakdown of all costs, including administrative costs and salaries and that this be made readily available to the public.
- Ensure that new funding, ear-marked for patient care, is not diverted for other purposes and provide a complete accounting for all such additional funds.
- Reduce costs through the increased utilization of a variety of healthcare professionals, when their use is appropriate and cost effective.
- Reduce costs through the development of the electronic health record and the provision of telemedicine capabilities to assist health professionals practicing in rural and remote areas.
- Support the development of an efficient and affordable mental health and addiction initiative for British Columbians.
- Recognize the increasing burden of chronic illness and support initiatives for better care of these patients resulting in fewer complications, lower cost, and better quality of life.
- Support and recognize the benefits of community care facilities as well as including the Community Health Representative program, particularly for services in rural areas.
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