‘Hugely disappointed’ in Higgs’ health shake up, says rural health group co-chair John Higham
John Higham is not very hopeful about the shake-up in New Brunswick health care announced last week by Premier Blaine Higgs. In fact, the former Sackville mayor and co-chair of the Rural Health Action Group says he is “hugely disappointed” in Higgs’ announcement on Friday that he is firing Horizon CEO John Dornan, dissolving Horizon and Vitalité boards, and shuffling his cabinet ministers around to put Bruce Fitch in charge of health and Dorothy Shephard in charge of social development.
Higham has been involved in defending health care services in Sackville since the “first significant threat” to the hospital took place while he was mayor, in February 2020. Since then, the overarching issue he’s observed is that “health services have just been divorced from community needs and desire to help.” Higham felt the work he and the other volunteers of the Rural Health Action Group have done in the past while was working towards changing that.
“We saw some great progress in the last few years,” Higham says, “particularly with our collaboration with Horizon and with Dr. Dornan’s understanding of what he saw in rural [health], and what was required. And now I just don’t see any of that. I’m really frustrated with this announcement.”
Here the full interview with John Higham here:
