REGINA — The Official Opposition has announced the appointment of a lead researcher to bring forward health-care recommendations from the party’s current consultations.
At the legislature, NDP Leader Carla Beck introduced Dr. Cheryl Camillo, a recently retired associate professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Regina who previously had extensive experience in the United States.
Beck said Camillo will “work directly with our MLAs and myself as leader to deliver clear recommendations for improving healthcare in Saskatchewan.”
“And these recommendations are going to come through our consultation with workers, with patients, with community leaders, and so many other stakeholders in our province who know that we need big, bold changes in healthcare. And like so many Saskatchewan people, Cheryl is alarmed by the current state of healthcare in our province, and I am incredibly grateful that she's stepped up to help us fix it, put things back on track in this province."
Dr. Camillo said that while at the University of Regina, she was finishing research on the state of the rural health-care system. She said she was alarmed by the facts compiled on service disruptions, such as laundry services that were closed in rural health-care facilities, health-care workers going six months at a time without a 30-minute lunch break, and health-care closures that added up to 18 years if you added up the days over a four-year period.
“These facts were so distressing to me that when we completed and published that research, I shared it with Jared (Clarke, NDP rural health critic), who I had known from being on a panel with at the University of Regina, and thankfully, he responded almost immediately by inviting me to have coffee with him to lay out the plans that this team has to fix that crisis, to solve the problems,” said Camillo.
She said that was in “stark contrast to my experience with the government of Saskatchewan, who has never responded or engaged with any of the research findings I've delivered on Saskatchewan-centred research projects over the last 10 years.”
Dr. Camillo said that she told Clarke that she would be “honoured to contribute my free time in retirement to contributing to fixing this system and making Saskatchewan once again a high-quality place to live.”
At their news conference, the NDP reiterated their intentions to fight any attempts by the government to move Saskatchewan toward more private health care.
Beck pointed out that Camillo came to Canada from the U.S.A. and "she can speak with great knowledge and great detail on her concerns about any attempts by Scott Moe and the Sask Party to move to two-tier American-style healthcare in this province."
Camillo told reporters that “moving to an American-style, two-tiered health care system in Saskatchewan would be a disaster for us all. And I'm saying that because Scott Moe has signalled that it's heading this way, that he's moving in that direction. And we also see legislation to that effect coming forward next door in Alberta.”
As for where things stood for the NDP with their Your Care, Your Say consultations, there are still no conclusions to come out of those. Beck said that one of the things they are finding is that the more health-care consultation meetings they have, the more people in those facilities and communities go and talk to coworkers, and "we have more and more people reach out."
“Right now, we have more people reaching out than we have time in the day to speak with," Beck said.
NDP Health critic Meara Conway said they plan to issue an interim report after the initial phase of consultation. “It just takes time. We don't want to rush it,” said Conway, who said the engagement “has been very positive.”
In terms of proposed solutions to expect from those consultations, Conway said they plan to be “focused on short-term, medium-term, long-term, and including kind of some fairly obvious common-sense fixes, all the way to the big, bold change that we know is needed to turn health care around in this province.”
Health minister says NDP are putting politics first
The Sask Party government made clear they were unimpressed by the latest announcement on health care by the NDP.
“This is why no one can take the NDP seriously,” said Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill in a statement. “They continue to focus on tired, old privatization boogeyman stories and importing political debates from Alberta and the United States, instead of offering real solutions for Saskatchewan patients.”
Cockrill said the government was focused on putting patients first by delivering improved access to publicly funded health care.
“This includes delivery of some publicly funded, privately delivered health services which the NDP have consistently campaigned to shut down. This would result in the cancellation of thousands of surgeries and diagnostic procedures performed in Saskatchewan every year, further increasing wait times for Saskatchewan patients,” said Cockrill. “While our government continues to increase access and put patients first, the NDP is putting politics and ideology first as they always do.”
