News/Canada/Nova Scotia

A program aimed at ensuring vision problems aren't holding Nova Scotia's youngest students back has outfitted more than 20 children with free eyeglasses since launching in February.The Eye See, Eye Learn program is open to children in pre-primary or primary who have a valid Nova Scotia health card.Shawn Creelman is a parent of one of those kids. He said his family was informed about the program during a routine eye exam when they discovered their five-year-old son needed glasses."My wife and I are fortunate enough that we do have private insurance, but if a family didn't have that option, it's nice to know that children, especially school aged, have the opportunity to get glasses for free," Creelman said.The program already operates in a number of provinces, including throughout Atlantic C...

Dorothy Lamont, 96, lives independently in her downtown Dartmouth home, still growing her own vegetables in her backyard every summer. But her biggest worry is not having a family doctor.

Nova Scotia's internal travel nurse program is off to a slow start, but officials say that's by design.The program, promised by the Progressive Conservatives in the last provincial election and long called for by the Nova Scotia Nurses' Union, launched earlier this spring.Although the goal is to have 30 registered nurses participate in the yearlong pilot that right now is based at the Aberdeen Hospital emergency department in New Glasgow, so far eight people have been hired and either started working or will join the team in the coming months.Jennifer MacDougall, a director with Nova Scotia Health whose responsibilities include nursing engagement strategies, said some of the people who applied did not have the necessary background to meet the hiring criteria. Other applicants were interest...

When Lily MacDonald first signed in to an online workout session for women with COPD, she was sure she wasn't going to like it. She couldn't imagine doing an effective workout at her kitchen table."At first I thought, 'How can I exercise, what am I going to do?'" said MacDonald, who lives in Glace Bay, N.S. She was one of the first participants in a pilot project to offer virtual physical rehabilitation to lung patients in rural parts of the province.The project went so well it will expand across the Maritimes this fall."I felt great, I really did," MacDonald said. "As it happens, you live by yourself, you have no motivation, but I started back into exercising."Carley O'Neill says a lot of people with COPD in rural areas don't get the support they need because they are unable to attend reh...

The first sign that something was off was the sound of truck doors being slammed outside, a puzzling break to the peace inside the yurt located down a long driveway in a wooded rural outstretch not far from the quaint town of Annapolis Royal, N.S.Within moments, a ceremonial leader named Michael Adzich had been arrested, and police were inside the tent-like structure, leaving gobsmacked six women who were in the last hours of a three-day spiritual retreat."It felt so violating to our space," Jennifer Wilson, who attended the November 2022 ceremony as a helper, told a Halifax court this week.What RCMP officers found at the site, a tar-like substance located inside a freezer, is now at the heart of an unusual case this week in Nova Scotia Supreme Court, pitting what the federal government ef...

The number of serious bedsores reportedly found in patients in Nova Scotia hospitals has risen, but the province says it is only because it is counting them differently.However, a patient safety advocate says that's no comfort because they shouldn't happen at all.The number of stage 3 and 4 bedsores reported by the Health Department in the most recent quarter tripled when compared to the average over the last two years."That is not particularly alarming to me based on the data that we have available to us, but certainly overall we are not where we would like to be as an organization and we recognize that we have improvement to do and are very, very committed to doing that work," said Rochelle Currie, Nova Scotia Health's senior director of quality improvement.The average was 21, but there ...

Nova Scotia Health is working to expand access to youth gender-affirming care in the province by replicating a clinic model introduced in the Annapolis Valley last year.In February 2024, a youth clinic dedicated to providing this kind of health care opened in Kentville. Then another opened this March in Bridgewater, with more clinics in the works."Accessing gender-affirming care isn't just a city thing or an urban thing," said mental health clinician Julien Davis, who is also trans. "We exist in rural settings as well and … ideally should be able to access that care wherever we're at."The clinics provide puberty blocker and hormone therapy treatments to youth who have hit puberty, up to age 16. Children and their families can also be referred ahead of puberty to discuss questions and conce...

The IWK is launching a new research unit aimed at helping patients with breast cancer across Nova Scotia.The idea came from Dr. Gregory Knapp, a surgical oncologist at the IWK and Victoria General Hospital who moved back to Halifax in 2020 after fellowships in New York and Calgary.Knapp said he found it jarring to read reports from the Canadian Cancer Society that revealed Nova Scotia has the lowest survival rate in the country for those diagnosed with breast cancer."I realized that I was going to be doing 50 per cent of my practice focused on breast cancer, and we didn't have provincial or even really local clinical outcomes," he said.The Canadian Cancer Society says one in eight Canadian women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. The society estimated that 185 Nova Scotians woul...

The foundation of the new long-term care facility in Chester, N.S., is nearly complete, a milestone in a development the community has wanted for nearly two decades.The new Shoreham Village will replace the aging building next door, which — at 50 years old — is outdated and would have needed significant changes in order to meet modern health and safety standards for the industry."The biggest problem with the building is not so much just the infrastructure, it's just the fact that there's shared rooms," said Charbel Daniel, CEO of Shoreham Village and the Northwood Group of Companies, which manages the facility."The entire long-term care sector is moving away from the shared-room model to independent rooms, something that we've witnessed through COVID as part of safety reasons to make sure ...

Nova Scotia is confirming its first case of measles.Dr. Robert Strang, the chief medical officer of health, told a news conference Tuesday that the patient is an adult in Halifax who recently travelled to the United States. They went to the emergency department at the QEII hospital in Halifax on Sunday night."We were well prepared for this," Strang said. "Appropriate steps were taken very quickly when this person came in for care to minimize exposure."Strang said the patient had one dose of the measles vaccine when they were younger, but did not receive the second. The Health Department said in a news release that "people generally need two [doses] to be fully vaccinated" against measles.Strang said people should not be alarmed by the situation because measles outbreaks in Canada are large...