Options needed after sexual health clinic cuts

The Horizon Health Network is trying to find alternate treatment for young adults who'll be shut out of sexual health clinics on June 30.

The health network's plan comes less than a week after three doctors at a clinic in Fredericton resigned over the provincial government's plan to no longer allow citizens between the ages of 20 and 24 to access the sexual health clinics.

Faye Skaarup, an official with the Horizon Health Network, said only 35 per cent of the young people have their own family doctors, so health officials are working to match them up with other medical staff.

"We have a list of alternative caregivers who have agreed to partner with us for those people for community care services," Skaarup said.

Young people will no longer be able to access the clinics for birth control and sexually transmitted infection tests.

Skaarup is advising the hundreds of patients who are 20 and older, who will be impacted by this cut, to visit the clinics before the June 30 deadline for tests and for birth control prescriptions.

"If, for example, they need a pap test before their birth control is renewed. We will do that and provide them with a prescription for a year," Skaarup said.

Dr. Eilish Cleary, the province's chief medical officer of health, said last week that she's empathetic with the situation faced by people who access these clinics. But she said the provincial government's 16 public health nurses shouldn't be providing primary care.

Marilyn Merritt-Gray, an instructor at the University of New Brunswick's faculty of nursing, said the provincial government should rethink its decision.

"I believe that the whole situation should be rescinded and they put those resources back in place," Merritt-Gray said.