SASKTAOON — With Saint Paul’s Hospital as a backdrop, Saskatchewan NDP Shadow Minister for Health Vicki Mowat again called on the government to rise to the challenge of the steady population growth in the province and pointed out that the health-care system's needs have to be addressed better to meet the demand.
Recent data from Statistics Canada showed Saskatchewan’s annual population grew by 2.5 per cent, which remains the fourth lowest among the provinces and below the three per cent national growth rate. As of July 1, 2024, Saskatchewan had an estimated population of 1,239,865.
“We'd certainly need to keep up with a growing population. One of the challenges, though, with these hospitals in the city is [that] they serve the whole province. They don't simply serve Saskatoon. It's not simply a Saskatoon growth problem. The whole system needs to be addressed,” said Mowat at a news conference on Friday.
Saint Paul’s alone is at 200 per cent in overcapacity, the opposition points out, while the Royal University Hospital has been at 300 per cent since October.
Mowat added that tertiary care centres take patients from all provincial hospitals, particularly from northern Saskatchewan, and there are specialists in Saskatoon who also take patients from Regina.
Mowat said one solution brought up by the official opposition during the campaign was to have other hospital emergency rooms operate 24 hours a day, a small step that could ease the strain of overcapacity in other ERs.
“We also need to ensure patients can flow through the hospital. One of the reasons we have so many folks in the emergency room is because there isn't room in the rest of the hospital for patients that need a bed that is admitted to the hospital,” said Mowat.
“So, having spaces for people to go, making sure we have enough long-term care [and] community care spaces for people to go into is also a big part of the picture. As well as making sure people have a family doctor they can visit.”
She added that about 200,000 people across the province do not have a family doctor or even a nurse practitioner, leading to more patients ending up in ERs and more complex issues once they get into hospitals like in Saskatoon.
“The health-care system is in crisis. It needs immediate attention from this government, and they are sitting on their hands while patients are suffering. We've continued to hear from folks that it's worsened. We hear about health-care workers in tears trying to care for patients,” said Mowat, adding that 4,000 health-care workers left the system in 2023 alone.
“They got into these professions because they wanted to help people and are so constrained by their environments and not being provided with the resources they need to be able to make sure that patients can be treated with dignity, in privacy, instead of being treated in spaces that are not designed to be treatment spaces.”
Mowat noted that retaining health-care workers and hiring more nurses are needed, and they have been calling on the new Health Minister, Jeremy Cockrill, who's been in the position for more than a month, to take action.
“He's relatively new. We're hearing from folks on the front lines frustration with the fact that there's someone new in that role again. They say, ‘Another person must catch up with all the health-care issues to understand it.’ There is a lot of desire for things to change quickly. He [Cockrill] needs to get up to speed very quickly,” said Mowat.
“We have to be able to provide health care to people in this province. It is our responsibility, according to the Canadian Constitution. One of the central roles of the provincial government is to provide health care. This has to be fixed. We have lost so many people through the system, and patients are not getting care.”
