Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have reached an agreement on oversight for serious incidents involving police in both provinces.
The agreement ensures both provinces will benefit from the Nova Scotia Serious Incident Response Team’s (SiRT) expertise and independent police oversight.
An agreement in principle for a Nova Scotia-New Brunswick SiRT was announced in September 2021.
Since then, both provinces have worked together to ensure the appropriate legislative and policy frameworks are in place.
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick will share the costs, resources and benefits of the service.
Additional resources include a new office in New Brunswick, as well as a new assistant director, three investigators and an administrator, who will all be based in New Brunswick.
The Nova Scotia SiRT director remains responsible for the overall management of SiRT’s operations in both provinces and has the sole authority to decide whether a charge is laid.
Nova Scotia’s information and privacy commissioner is calling on Nova Scotia Health to improve its privacy practices after investigating intentional breaches by some of its employees.
Tricia Ralph said in a report that steps are needed to prevent staff from accessing the personal information of patients for non-treatment purposes.
Ralph began investigating a series of privacy breaches in August 2020, after the health authority voluntarily reported that it had caught eight employees snooping in the electronic health records of individuals associated with the events of the April 2020 mass shooting.
Nova Scotia Health investigated the eight employees and found that some had snooped into many patients’ records over a number of years.
The Nova Scotia Health investigation wound up uncovering more than 1,200 privacy breaches affecting 270 individuals.
She said that some of the health authority’s policies and protocols related to privacy are outdated, unclear, and in many cases are not being followed.
Ralph made 12 recommendations to Nova Scotia Health, with the goal of preventing future privacy breaches.
Doctors and nurses in Nova Scotia say new federal money for health care must be spent on primary care and increasing staffing levels.
Dr. Leisha Hawker, president of Doctors Nova Scotia, says improving the primary care clinic structure will help attract new physicians to a province where 130,000 residents are currently without a family doctor.
She says increasing access to primary care will also reduce strain on emergency rooms.
Janet Hazelton, president of the Nova Scotia Nurses Union, says nurses are chronically short-staffed, and funding should be directed towards hiring more nurses.
The federal government has proposed a 10-year, $196-billion health spending plan, which adds $46.2 billion in new money to health care across Canada.
The plan will provide Nova Scotia with $154 million in new money this year, and $102 million annually in subsequent years.
In the Maritime Junior Hockey League The Pictou County Weeks Jr A Crushers face off against the Fredericton Red Wings tonight at the Pictou County Wellness Centre.
