REGINA - Parental consent legislation may have been the top issue of the day inside the legislature Monday, but healthcare was the top issue outside of it.
Both the Sask Party government and the Official Opposition NDP staged competing announcements in competing cities Monday, providing dramatically-opposing pictures of the state of health care in the province.
In Regina, Premier Scott Moe and several cabinet ministers and MLAs were on hand for the sod-turning on the Regina General Hospital parkade project. The new facility will include 1,005 stalls, with 873 stalls in the parkade and 132 surface stalls, a net increase of 686 parking stalls.
At that announcement, Moe touted the government’s commitment to health care infrastructure in the province.
“It’s through investments in infrastructure like this, that we are building and protecting the very pillars of our resilient community, and our commitment spans the entire province, not just the city of Regina, in building safer and essential healthcare facilities that are essential infrastructure in our province, and essential infrastructure in each community where they reside,” said Moe.
He pointed to the Victoria Hospital redesign in Prince Albert, the new hospital in Weyburn, a new urgent care centre on Albert Street, Regina, and a similar project in Saskatoon, as well as the addition of new long term care shelters including a commitment of an additional 600 long term care beds in Regina.
That same morning, outside Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Official Opposition Health Critic Vicki Mowat and Rural and Remote Health Critic Matt Love were calling on the government to focus on what they call the "crisis" in health care.
In particular, they pointed to the latest overcapacity issues at Saskatchewan hospitals. In an NDP news release Monday, they reported Royal University Hospital has 88 patients waiting to be transferred to a different bed and 41 patients in the ER without a bed as of that morning.
Mowat and Love also pointed to issues in rural healthcare. In their news release, they noted acute care services in Broadview had been “temporarily unavailable” since June 2021; that emergency and outpatient services have been “temporarily unavailable” in Wilkie since June 2021; that Lanigan, Watrous, Redvers and Wolseley were on long-term reduced services and reduced hours of operation; and that Biggar emergency room services were open just sporadically through October. The NDP also reported temporary disruptions to Canora hospital on Sept. 29 between 2 and 8 p.m., and at Galloway Health Centre from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. on Oct. 10, 13 and 14.
In speaking later that afternoon back at the Legislature, Mowat decried the acute care capacity issues being seen.
“It’s really concerning when we have the president of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses coming out and talking about how this has been the state in our hospitals for weeks now, where we don’t have the capacity to have people move through the system or to have new patients admitted into the hospital,” Mowat said.
“It’s not something that is normal, it’s not something we should be comfortable with, and it certainly doesn’t provide people with the care that they need or expect going into our hospitals.”
Mowat said she welcomed new infrastructure projects, and said her party “believed they absolutely need a new parkade” at Regina General Hospital, noting that was also an NDP election promise.
But Mowat added "what we don’t need is more announcements, what we need more action from this government… We also need people to staff those facilities, and there is a huge concern when it comes to the health human resources crisis that exists right now and their inability to attract and retain healthcare workers in the system.”
She also believed the level of staffing was not keeping up with the projects. “Absolutely not. We have an example with the Sask. Hospital in North Battleford as well that has never fully opened, has never had all hands on deck in full staffing capacity. That’s something that was built years ago, and they still haven’t managed to staff up to capacity.”
SHA confirms overcapacity issues being seen right now
At the Regina media event, Andrew Will, CEO of Saskatchewan Health Authority, confirmed the SHA “definitely see surges in patient need over time, and currently are seeing higher than normal volumes of patients accessing services in our acute care facilities. Certainly, we’ve done many things to address those challenges, including opening additional beds, providing additional staffing support during times when we are busy, and also working very hard on placing what we would describe as alternate level of care patients in other care settings when appropriate to do that.”
Regarding acute care capacity, Will wasn’t able to provide precise numbers but did say “we’re definitely over full capacity, currently. This week is a little better than last week was.”
As for what was behind the current pressures, Will said there is “certainly lots of reasons that bringing patients to our facilities. Currently respiratory illnesses are on the rise. We are seeing increases admissions due to COVID(-19) and other respiratory illnesses.”
When Premier Moe was asked about the concerns raised about hospital overcapacity, he pointed to the province’s commitments to address the issue by building additional hospital and urgent care space and also pointed to their commitment to increasing ER capacity from 79 to 120 beds.
“So part of that is finding physical space in the hospitals and adding physical space. The larger part of it is hiring people, and that’s why you’ve seen the government come forward with a four point Health Human Resource plan, one of the most ambitious human resource efforts in Canada, and then most certainly we're committed to doing just that. So we are going to see times when our healthcare capacity most certainly is finding its upper limit; that’s why were increasing these numbers today in the weeks ahead, and ultimately increasing them even more as we build additional facilities — for example, right now, Prince Albert, Weyburn are in early construction stages.”
As for whether the human resources in those health care facilities can keep up, Moe acknowledged it was “the Canadian challenge, and I would say it goes beyond the challenge in our nation of Canada.”
He said it was an issue talked about repeatedly at premier’s meetings, and will be the topic at a future meeting which will focus on provincial health human resource plans across Canada
As for Saskatchewan, “we have an ambitious Health and Human Resource plan, one that we discussed many times publicly, and we’re going to continue implementing it to attract people, to train people, ultimately to retain and incentivize them to be in areas where we need them to be offering services to the general public of thr province.”
SHA CEO Will said he was “very excited about the support we received through the Health and Human Resources Action Plan."
"We’ve been working very hard to hire all the graduates that we train here in Saskatchewan, and we basically told all of those graduates for hard-recruit areas ‘you’re hired, we have a job for you.’ We’ve seen significant improvements in recruitment of staff into hard to recruit areas throughout the province. This is certainly helping us ensure we’re able to provide the services patients need each and every day.”
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