REGINA – The opposition New Democrats are once more on the attack over long delays being reported at hospitals in Saskatchewan’s major cities.
At a news conference at the Legislature the NDP’s Jacqueline Roy pointed to the release of a dashboard from the Saskatchewan Health Authority, a screen grab of which was leaked to the Opposition on Friday.
Roy told reporters that according to that dashboard, patients were reported waiting 103 hours for care in the emergency department at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.
At St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon, the longest wait was 81 hours while at Regina General, the wait was up to 67 hours.
Roy blames the situation on emergency care having been “driven into the ground” by Premoer Scott Moe and the Sask Party.
“Imagine waiting whole days in the emergency room for care. These are the government's own tracking documents, we want to make that clear. There is no amount of spin they can do to get out of this. Healthcare has been falling apart for years and it's in worse shape than ever.”
Roy also noted that similar data was leaked to the NDP in mid-December. “What will it take for these guys to do something, anything quite frankly to improve healthcare? All they do is they downplay these concerns and gasline frontline workers speaking out and demanding better. So my message to Scott Moe today is this.
Acknowledge the problem, apologize for your failures and then get to work on making improvements now. If not, then step aside and let Carla Beck and her team step in because we will do what's necessary to get healthcare out of last place.”
Roy characterized the situation as being “really a symptom of a healthcare system that is collapsing.
“So we know that people are having difficulty, great difficulty accessing family physicians, accessing nurse practitioners, getting a hold of those inoculations that used to be very, very easy to get in the past. And what all of that does is pushes everything to a critical state, makes people sicker, and then they go to the ER and the ER is overloaded. So this is emblematic of an entire healthcare system that is collapsing.”
Roy adds that understaffing is a problem.
One of the things health care workers have mentioned, she said, is “that when we are looking at jobs, we have a lot of people that want to come to this province that aren't looking for part- time, they aren't looking for casual, they are looking for full-time work.”
Roy pointed to their “big bold change” health care consultations that the Opposition is conducting. “We will continue these consultations. We're not going to do them quickly. We're going to take our time to make sure that we get it right. I know they've said being treated with respect and dignity is also important to them staying in this province. But absolutely, this is both a healthcare system that has too many patients and not enough people to meet those demands.”
In a statement, the Saskatchewan Health Authority says they "monitor emergency department and acute care capacity across all hospital sites in the province on a continuous, real-time basis to support system-wide decision making, including transport decisions for patients who require a higher level of care or transfer to home hospital. This monitoring includes overall hospital occupancy, patients identified for admission and those being monitored in emergency departments. A scoring system is used to assess levels of risk and to guide appropriate actions at different thresholds."
"Interpreting internal documents which are used regularly by health system experts to inform decision making outside of their intended context should be done with caution. Wait times listed on the image referenced earlier today do NOT represent the time it takes to receive care or have access to an emergency room physician. The data referenced reflect the entire time a patient spends in the ED, which will vary from patient to patient depending on the acuity level and type of care required."
The SHA adds that they are "committed to meeting the needs of patients as close to home as possible, including during periods of increased demand, while ensuring patients can be safely transferred to appropriate facilities to meet their care needs. The SHA would also like to take this opportunity to thank our staff and physicians for the work that they do every day to help deliver care."
