“Every day the emergency departments in this province are functioning completely out of their waiting rooms. That means no privacy for patients on the worst day of their life.”
As an emergency room nurse, Stephanie Fehr is used to a fast-paced, stressful environment where decisions have to be quick and life sometimes hangs in the balance.
“We have been shouting for help for four years.”
Fehr works in the ER of Saskatoon’s St. Paul’s Hospital, which she said is consistently over capacity.
“We function in this over-capacity situation every day,” she said.
That means there are no beds for patients and people are kept in hallways or in rooms previously meant for storage.
At one point last week, she said her 33-bed department was housing 41 patients.
“Every day the emergency departments in this province are functioning completely out of their waiting rooms,” said Fehr. “That means no privacy for patients on the worst day of their life.”
That’s why, on Tuesday, the Saskatchewan NDP made the commitment to restore City Hospital’s ER to 24/7 service if elected to form government. The ER is currently open seven days a week, but only from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
“There’s overcrowding at St. Paul’s and the Royal University Hospital,” said Opposition health critic Vicki Mowat.
“We have sick patients stuck in hallways, breaking the fire code, while Saskatoon City Hospital has underutilized space where they can be properly cared for. We built it, and we should use it.”
Fehr painted a different picture, saying the issues around staffing and the hospital functioning at capacity every day has led to health-care workers “leaving in droves.”
“This broken system is killing your nurses, your doctors, your paramedics and your support staff, and not to mention killing the patients in this province,” she said Tuesday.
According to CBC Saskatchewan, when Hindley was asked to provide a net number of doctors that have come to the province versus doctors who’ve left, Hindley did not have exact numbers but believed it was “a net positive.”
On Tuesday morning, the Leader-Post asked the Ministry of Health to provide the net plus-minus of doctors and nurses in Saskatchewan over the past four years. For example, if two doctors came to Saskatchewan but one left, there would be a net increase of one doctor. The information was requested in this way to better understand the potential impact of the HHR and to see how many Saskatchewan health-care workers have left the field over the action plan’s time frame.
The ministry did not provide those figures, instead offering the gross number of doctors, family physicians and specialists licensed from March 2019 to March 2024, as well as the gross number of nurses (RN and NP) licensed in the province from 2019 to 2023.
Over that time period, family physicians in Saskatchewan increased from 1,340 to 1,466 and specialists increased from 1,260 to 1,441.
“We now have more nurses practising in Saskatchewan than at any other time in history,” said the Ministry of Health in an email.
In 2019, there were 11,685 RNs and 273 NPs, compared to 13,605 RNs and 360 NPs in 2023, according to the ministry.
“In 2023, Saskatchewan’s number of regulated nursing per capita (1,321 nurses per 100,000 population) was higher than the national rate (1,104 nurses per 100,000),” said the ministry.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) West joined the NDP in its criticism of the HRR in a news release issued Tuesday afternoon. The union argued that, two years after the plan was introduced, most of the hard-to-recruit jobs listed on the Saskatchewan Health Authority website remain on the list.
“The SaskParty Government is gambling that current health-care staff won’t quit, won’t retire, won’t cut back their hours due to burnout, or move to another province,” stated the release, which also calls on the province to pay health-care workers more.
The Regina Leader-Post has created an Afternoon Headlines newsletter that can be delivered daily to your inbox so you are up to date with the most vital news of the day. Click here to subscribe.
With some online platforms blocking access to the journalism upon which you depend, our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark leaderpost.com and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed. Click here to subscribe.