Canada’s health minister says Newfoundland and Labrador is setting the bar for other provinces when it comes to vaccination rates.

Jean-Yves Duclos was in St. John’s Wednesday to announce renewed funding for a program in partnership with Memorial University.

Almost $10 million—split about 50-50 with Ottawa—will ensure patient-oriented research that was first introduced in 2014 continues for the next five years.

So-called patient-oriented care is as it’s billed, focusing on the feedback, perspective and first-hand knowledge the patient has of their own care.

But Duclos quickly shifted to the importance of vaccinations and boosters as new, worrying variants of COVID-19 continue to emerge.

The federal health minister says this province gets it, and leads the way.

He notes Newfoundland and Labrador is the eastern-most province, but also the most successful when it comes to all categories of vaccinations, and thus a model for other jurisdictions in the country.

Meanwhile, newly-minted provincial health minister Tom Osborne says the first step toward ending emergency department closures is recruitment.

Osborne says it’s the challenge of improving and ultimately fixing the health care system that keeps him going.

He says no one wants to see such measures, adding while it might take some time, the goal is to reduce and eliminate the sporadic, albeit temporary closures of rural emergency departments.