One Week for French — Then a Translator?
Last weekend, we asked a straightforward question:
Where are the French appointments on Virtual Care NB?
The booking system showed future appointments available in English, while no online French appointments appeared available.
Now, a Francophone New Brunswicker has publicly described what happened when she tried to obtain care.
She says she waited one week for an appointment and required a translator because no bilingual or French-speaking nurse practitioner was available.
This raises an important question:
Is an appointment with a translator now considered equivalent to receiving timely health care in French?
Because that is very different from what eVisitNB was previously told by the Department of Health.
The Department of Health considered this exact issue before
On January 30, 2025, during discussions about French-language access through eVisitNB, the Department of Health responded directly to a proposal involving the use of a live translation service.
Its response was unequivocal:
“The use of a language line does not comply to the Official Languages Act for the services you are offering.”
In subsequent meetings, eVisitNB was advised that simply providing translation would not meet the required threshold for the quality and equality of the service being provided in both official languages.
In other words, a translation service was not regarded as equivalent to actually providing the clinical service in the patient’s chosen official language.
So eVisitNB changed its approach
That created a real operational challenge.
It would have been much easier to use a translation service whenever a French-speaking clinician was unavailable.
But that was not the standard eVisitNB understood the Department of Health to require.
So eVisitNB pursued an aggressive recruitment strategy focused on increasing the number of bilingual and Francophone nurse practitioners available to patients.
The objective was straightforward:
A patient choosing French should receive their health-care consultation in French — not simply access care through a translator because a French-speaking clinician was unavailable.
That took recruitment, scheduling, workforce planning and ongoing effort.
But the problem was solved.
French-speaking patients could obtain timely virtual care directly from clinicians able to provide that care in French.
What changed?
This is why the experience being reported today is so difficult to understand.
When Virtual Care NB was launched, New Brunswickers were told the service would provide bilingual services seven days a week, with same-day or next-day scheduled appointments.
Yet a Francophone patient is now reporting a one-week wait, followed by an appointment requiring a translator because no bilingual or Francophone nurse practitioner was available.
If the Department of Health explicitly told eVisitNB in January 2025 that using using a translator did not comply with the Official Languages Act for the service being offered, how can a replacement service now rely on translation when a French-speaking provider is unavailable?
Has the standard changed?
If it has, why?
If it has not, how is the current model acceptable?
This is about more than translation
Translation and interpretation services have an important role in health care.
But interpretation and bilingual clinical care are not the same thing.
There is a meaningful difference between a Francophone patient speaking directly with a French-speaking nurse practitioner and a Francophone patient communicating through a translator because no French-speaking clinician is available.
That distinction becomes even more important when the patient has already waited a week for care that was promoted as available the same day or next day.
eVisitNB was required to solve the problem — and did
When translation was deemed insufficient, eVisitNB invested in recruitment and built the bilingual clinical capacity necessary to provide timely care directly in French.
If the replacement service is now being permitted to use translation because it has not recruited sufficient bilingual or Francophone clinicians, that appears to be a fundamentally different standard.
New Brunswickers deserve to know why.
The Official Languages Act did not become less important when the contractor changed.
The expectation of equal-quality service did not disappear when the platform changed.
And Francophone New Brunswickers did not suddenly become entitled to a different standard of care.
Wasn’t the new service supposed to be better?
The replacement of eVisitNB was presented as an improvement.
But improvements should be visible in the patient experience.
If eVisitNB could provide timely access to French-speaking clinicians, while patients using its replacement are waiting a week and then relying on translation because no Francophone clinician is available, it is reasonable to ask:
What exactly has improved?
A bilingual website is not a bilingual health-care service.
A translator is not the same as receiving timely care in French.
And a standard that the Department of Health considered inadequate for eVisitNB in January 2025 should not quietly become acceptable simply because the provider has changed.
