Good afternoon to you all.
I would like to begin by thanking all the members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages for having invited the Société santé et mieux-être en français du Nouveau-Brunswick to come and present a brief on the conditions under which our organization operates in New Brunswick.
In Acadia, we are always happy to receive important visitors, and we hope that our Acadian hospitality has met your expectations.
Our presentation will be brief, and will attempt to describe a number of French-language societal issues in New Brunswick, in addition to future prospects for the Réseau Santé en français.
Our society was founded just over three years ago. We are members of the Réseau Santé en français, which is our national counterpart. Our provincial organization has three action networks working in the field of wellness, service organization, and health training and research in French. More than 60 professionals in the province representing our partners in health are involved directly in our organization's activities. These partners include policy makers, training institutions and regional management institutions, professional associations and representatives of the Acadian and francophone community.
Our work consists of formulating and implementing strategies designed to improve access to primary health care services in French throughout the province.
We have just completed a provincial consultation entitled Préparer le terrain. This national initiative of the Société Santé en français was funded by Health Canada under the Primary Health Care Transition Fund. Its purpose was to develop a primary health care services plan that would provide health care system decision-makers with data to help them make well-informed decisions about the best ways of delivering primary health services to the francophone population in all regions of Canada. The project identified potential avenues for action in primary health care and services. Here are a few examples.
The communities of Fredericton, Miramichi and Saint John, which are mainly anglophone work together with the provincial government and the various regional health boards to identify and develop the optimal mode or modes of delivery to meet their specific needs and priorities.
Here is another example. Recognizing and making use of the skills available in the community health system lead to a wider range of services and to a more coordinated response to the needs of the Acadian and francophone population.
A strategy for gathering and managing information about the status of community health, which also covers all of the factors that influence health, has been developed by the provincial government in cooperation with Statistics Canada, the regional health board and the community.
We are now working to implement some of the actions identified in the course of the process. Needless to say, in Canada's only officially bilingual province, primary health issues vary considerably in terms of how they affect the Acadian and francophone population, depending on whether one is working in a region where the francophone population is predominantly francophone as opposed to a region where the population is predominantly anglophone.
This issue is what characterizes the work of our society. We all know that equitable access to health services in the language of your choice is a particular problem in a bilingual province like ours. Some regions have a very small Acadian population, but in principle, the Act guarantees access to all services in the language of your choice. One therefore needs to be highly innovative to find solutions.
We were innovative in the partnership model we used for our Société santé et mieux-être en français du Nouveau-Brunswick. We feel that a health planning process that involves the partners, including the community, allows for acceptable compromises. We further believe that planning a process like this can help avoid a number of situations like those that occurred recently in a number of Acadian and francophone regions.
In concluding, I would like to reiterate that our objective is to encourage conditions that will allow people receiving services from the health care system to be served at the appropriate time by the appropriate provider in the language of their choice.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.