Houston government to make it harder for employers to require sick notes and makes it easier for health care providers to move to Nova Scotia - Halifax Examiner
The Houston government is introducing legislation today to streamline what it calls administrative hurdles to health care delivery. In particular, the legislation: • makes it illegal for employers to require a doctor’s note from employees for sicknesses of five days or fewer. But should an employee take two sick leaves of five days or fewer […] The Houston government is introducing legislation to make it harder for employers to require sick notes and make it easier for health care providers to move to Nova Scotia. The legislation removes all application fees for any health care provider seeking to relocate from other Canadian jurisdiction to Nova Nova Scotia, and all applications must be processed within five business days. The government also says it will now pay for the first year licensing fees of any health Care provider relocating to NovaScotia, which can range from $1,000 to $2,000 annually. The change, said Health Minister Michelle Thompson, will save 50,000 hours of physician time annually.
प्रकाशित : तीन महीने पहले द्वारा Tim Bousquet में Politics Health
The Houston government is introducing legislation today to streamline what it calls administrative hurdles to health care delivery.
In particular, the legislation:
• makes it illegal for employers to require a doctor’s note from employees for sicknesses of five days or fewer. But should an employee take two sick leaves of five days or fewer in any given 12-month period, the employer can require a doctor’s note for the third sick leave of any duration. The change, said Health Minister Michelle Thompson, will save 50,000 hours of physician time annually.
• removes all application fees for any health care provider seeking to relocate from other Canadian jurisdiction to Nova Scotia. Such fees can be up to $200 annually, depending on profession. The legislation also says all applications must be processed within five business days. Additionally the government says (no legislative change was required for this) it will now pay for the first year licensing fee of any health care provider relocating to Nova Scotia. Depending on the profession, licensing fees can range from $1,000 to $2,000 annually. The provider will be responsible for paying their own licensing fees after the first year.
• allows the colleges overseeing the 21 regulated health professions to recognize the credentials and licences of health care providers trained outside of Canada.
• allows the Governor in Council (the lieutenant governor, so in effect, the premier and cabinet ministers) to expand the scope of practice for the various regulated professions without the approval of the full legislature
• takes the authority to create forms required of employers away from the Workers Compensation Board and gives it to the Governor in Council instead.
“No longer will employers in Nova Scotia be permitted to require a doctor’s note when an employee can’t come into work because they are sick or hurt,” said Thompson. “This has been a waste of valuable time for our physicians — time that they cannot afford to lose. It is also a waste of time for Nova Scotians whose time would be better spent staying home, getting better. There are some parameters in place, of course, to protect employers from abuse.”
I asked Thompson how the government settled on five days as the doctor’s note requirement, and not six or 10, or the recommended seven-day COVID isolation period. She said that the five-day figure was arrived at after conducting a “jurisdictional scan” of other provinces’s legislation.
“I think we need to believe in people that those days are going to happen — we all have them — and then we used our discretion to move forward,” said Thompson. “So five days seems like a reasonable number to choose.”
विषय: Texas, Houston, Canada, Nova Scotia