It sounds like just another example of Sooke council shunting an issue into the study/consultation process, a stage that’s starting to look like an under-priced used car lot.
But Mayor Maja Tait’s cautious approach to creating more health-care initiatives and programs is a sound idea, if only because any move at all in improving community health care is better than nothing.
For nearly a decade (and through the administration of at least three mayors), there have been numerous attempts to get better health care facilities and programs based in Sooke.
True, we need more doctors.
True, we need more health practitioners like speech pathologists and physiotherapists and X-ray technicians to set up a primary urgent care network
True, health care is mostly a provincial responsibility.
But while politicians want to come up with all the answers, Tait’s approach has been to get all the stakeholders, including the public, to have a say on what’s needed to find a Sooke solution to the issue, particularly when the provincial government is in the midst of beefing up primary health care throughout the province. (It’s already announced plans for Langford, and there’s a promise Sooke is next on the list).
Mayor Tait is in a unique position, because she is on council, chairs a working group on local health care, and has a strong working relationship with Premier John Horgan, who is also the area’s MLA.
And her approach has always been much with the urging of local doctors is to find the right model that will fit Sooke’s need.
“The easiest thing I could have done was to build a building, but that wouldn’t have solved our health-care problems,” Tait told the Sooke News Mirror last week.
“Our focus is, and continues to be, to have the right model in place. We want to make sure nobody is left behind.”
And who could argue with that.