Over 100 people turned out Monday night for Gladstone's public meeting about the need for new nurse practitioners.

Municipality of Westlake-Gladstone Mayor David Single says the RHA is currently working hard to bring in two new nurse practitioners after the two they had decided to leave. The RHA sent four members to Monday's public meeting to show their support in bringing in the new staff members.

"CEO Kathy McPhail, Vice-President of Medical Denis Fortier, Executive Director North Marian Woods, and the Director of Health Services in Gladstone and MacGregor Shirley Guenther were in attendance," says Single. "So we had people there to answer questions but a lot of people were very disappointed. You can't blame them because they thought we had a good thing going here and all of a sudden the nurse practitioners are gone."

Single says the nurse practitioners were doing on-call work, which means if at the hospital they needed to talk to somebody after hours they could phone them.

"There was no model for paying the nurse practitioners so they were given time off in lieu of and it ended up they had so much time off they weren't having enough hours to have clinic time. So the RHA decided they would no longer get the nurse practitioners to do the on-call and they would get it straight through the doctors, whether it was the one local one we have left or doctors from Portage. Unfortunately, the nurse practitioners decided to go and work somewhere else."

Single says the strong attendance was good because it showed the concern from the public.

"It leaves us with basically one doctor after the end of March because the rest are leaving soon," adds Single. "So we have one full-time doctor on staff now, and the RHA is actively recruiting both physicians and nurse practitioners. So as soon as they find someone we'll have someone else in. In the meantime, they have other doctors to cover out here, the one doctor that is there isn't going to be there every day. They've always got staff to take care of those types of things so there will always be a doctor available."

Single says the people at the RHA want to keep the Gladstone hospital open, and if they want to keep it open they have to keep doctors or nurse practitioners.