REGINA - The opposition New Democrats released another campaign pledge on Monday, pledging to hire more permanent doctors and nurses to the province.
At their latest pre-election campaign announcement in Regina, NDP Leader Carla Beck pledged to invest $1.1 billion in critical frontline services to train and retain and hire doctors, nurses and specialists.
Beck pointed to continuous under-staffing and to emergency room wait times “skyrocketing.”
“Families in this province deserve healthcare when and where they need it, and that’s exactly what a Saskatchewan NDP government will deliver the people of this province,” said Beck.
“The first thing we can do to help alleviate the burnout among healthcare workers is to staff up and to train up. More nurses, more doctors, more healthcare workers. And we worked with healthcare workers listening to their solutions on how we can fix and we can rebuild our public healthcare system. We’ll invest $1.1 billion in critical healthcare services, implementing an aggressive strategy to keep doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals here in Saskatchewan, and listening to those local voices and experts about how the system should work and where we are currently failing.”
The party also repeated their call for a Nursing Task Force, and to phase out out-of-province private travel nurses. Of the latter, Beck said it has caused “massive morale issues within our hospitals and costs us millions more than hiring permanent health care workers within the public system.”
Beck noted that right now most of the health care vacancies in the province are being advertised as casual or part time. “It’s simply not working and we’re losing out to other provinces.”
The NDP’s latest announcement on health care was made at the same time that the Saskatchewan Party government had its own announcement marking the two year anniversary of the Health Human Resources Action Plan at Sask Polytechnic.
At that announcement Health Minister Everett Hindley indicated the government has had preliminary discussions with the unions for registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and also continuing care aides for the development of a task force or council of frontline health workers, similar to what the NDP was calling for.
In response to the Sask Party government touting the recruitment of 218 physicians to Saskatchewan under the Action Plan, as well as the recruiting of more specialists, Beck said the government “never wants to talk about net numbers.”
“The reality is that we continue to lose more healthcare professionals out of the province than any other province. You know, they talk about recruiting a gastroenterologist. In reality, we’ve lost two, that’s a net loss of one. And they’ve never stepped up to the levels that they stated we needed in the province in the first place.”
