THE BATTLEFORDS- The New Democrats hit the road on Thursday for meetings in the Northwest on their rural health care tour.
The NDP opposition leader Ryan Meili and their Critic for Health, Vicki Mowat, were in the Battlefords Thursday afternoon to meet with health care workers on the issues they faced.
Prior to that meeting, they met with Mayor Ames Leslie of Battleford. Earlier in the day, they were in Biggar and Wilkie for meetings there as well.
Meili said they were on the tour “learning more about the true story that rural healthcare in Saskatchewan is a mess right now."
“The SaskParty has really allowed things to get out of hand. Short staffing, overworked health care workers, and people unable to access the kind of healthcare to be able to count on in a province like ours.”
He pointed to rural issues such as service closures, loss of services and difficulty accessing care for seniors.
Meili said they were out there “making it clear it doesn’t have to be that way, and we’re going to be pushing hard in the legislature for this government to take the crisis in rural health care seriously.”
In terms of the tour itself on Thursday, one thing that stood out for Meili was a sign for a health care provider in Wilkie that stated “emergency services”.
“They just bolted the word ‘NO’ on it on the highway sign,” said Meili. “Emergency care has been closed since the beginning of the pandemic. They still haven’t reopened it.”
Meili also relayed the reaction he has gotten in talking to health care workers in Wilkie and Biggar.
“Folks are stressed, burned out, they’re working short-staffed doing jobs they weren’t trained to do, and their lives are suffering in the care of the patients that they’re committed to taking care of is suffering.”
Meili noted the stress on the system was not just COVID-19, but elsewhere as well.
“COVID-19 didn’t cause these problems, it revealed it,” Meili said.
“The government has been failing to invest in rural healthcare, failing to recruit and retain staff for years. These pressures were pre-existing and COVID has just a revealed how bad things really are.”
He also noted surgical wait times had “grown and grown”. He repeated familiar NDP points that were critical of the Moe government, saying they “ignored the modeling, ignored the public health experts, allowed this Fourth Wave to take off”.
“They were willing to put politics ahead of people’s lives,” said Meili. “Scott Moe refused to take responsibility, refused to recognize the ways he’s let people down.”
Health critic Mowat noted they had a number of families share their stories in the legislature the last number of weeks about lack of access to health care.
“And so, moving forward, we need to figure out how to get people access to that care, and that’s going to mean addressing this backlog of so many folks who have needed care who haven’t been able to get it,” said Mowat.
Mowat said the NDP have called on the province to build a human resources strategy to look at “how many nurses do we need, do we have enough seats for these people, what’s our recruitment strategy, what’s our retention strategy. And it’s not rocket science. We’ve had roundtables like this in this province before, but it’s just about looking at the bigger picture and making sure people are in place.”
She also pointed to a lack of full-time positions, pointing to job postings such as one for a “20 percent” position in Wilkie.
“It’s an attempt to save a dime,” said Mowat, who said they have been hearing these concerns a long time. “They need to be addressed, because the erosion of care and the impact on people in this province is really starting to pile up.”
