the new service agreement<\/a> and realize that collaborative care is very, very positive.\u201d<\/p>\nThe total number of people without primary care is likely higher than 125,000, since N.B. Health Link captures only people who have signed up to receive temporary care while they wait for a permanent option.<\/p>\n
Opposition skeptical<\/p>\n
The Official Opposition is skeptical of Dornan\u2019s ambitions to address the entire list.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, in my heart, we would all want to see 100 per cent of New Brunswickers have access to a doctor, that would be great,\u201d said interim Progressive Conservative Leader Glen Savoie.<\/p>\n
But he said with the amount of doctors retiring, making real progress on attaching New Brunswickers to primary care providers will require faster action than the government has achieved so far.<\/p>\n
![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765546389_696_default.jpg\")
Interim Progressive Conservative Leader Glen Savoie is skeptical Dornan will be able to accomplish his ambitious goals. (Silas Brown\/CBC)<\/p>\n
\u201cSo to be able to say unequivocally that that’s going to happen, well, good luck to him, but I don’t think it’s possible,\u201d Savoie said.<\/p>\n
If the next 20 clinics were to take a similar number of patients from the list, about 42,000 people would be attached by 2028. And it\u2019s not clear how quickly the first 14,000 people will be matched.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the news release about the Miramichi clinic, the province said 1,000 people will be rostered \u201cwithin two years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dornan admitted that even with the flurry of announcements, it does take time for them to start having an impact on the list of those without primary care.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s some that are being attached today and others will be attached to the next weeks, months, within the year, at least. So the 14,000 that we are anticipating don’t all come off the day that we announce a clinic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey come off in succeeding days, weeks, months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dornan is hoping that as more doctors move away from solo practice to the collaborative team-based model, working with nurses and other health-care providers such as pharmacists and physiotherapists, the patient loads of the clinics will increase.<\/p>\n
Expanding existing clinics ‘low hanging fruit’<\/p>\n
How the government tallies clinics is under scrutiny as well. Holt has been clear that not all of the clinics will be brand-new clinics. Of the 11 announced, nearly all of them are expansions of existing clinics with the government chipping in for additional staff, or a larger space.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Green Party Leader David Coon said the government is focusing on \u201clow hanging fruit\u201d in order to meet its promised influx of clinics.<\/p>\n
They \u201cpicked community health centres and practices that were already in one way or another collaborating and have invested some money to add staff or create additional space,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we’re not really seeing the creation of anything new.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both regional health authorities have lofty primary care goals themselves, targeting full attachment with primary care practitioners by 2029.<\/p>\n
Horizon and Vitalit\u00e9 run collaborative clinics, also known as family health teams, that do not count towards the government\u2019s goal of 30 clinics. Those 30 will be clinics receiving some sort of direct support from the Department of Health.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Coon said Dornan\u2019s goals will depend on how the government supports the next 20 clinics: if they continue to expand existing clinics or if they try to establish new ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they did was pick what was already happening. \u2018If we put a little more money in there, then that will augment what they can do,\u2019\u201d Coon said.<\/p>\n
New clinics \u201ccost a lot more money. So this upcoming budget should reflect the true cost of creating new collaborative care clinics as opposed to building on the shoulders of existing ones. And the budget will tell the story whether that’s going to happen or not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Health Minister John Dornan announced the 10th collaborative care clinic of the year Monday morning in Bathurst,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-340507","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Bristol](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765546388_470_default.jpg\")
Dornan said he wrote the asterisk because ultimately he wants to see many more than 14,000 people come off of the wait list. (Victoria Walton\/CBC)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765546389_64_default.jpg\")
<\/p>\n