Health authority confronts tangle of policies
CEO says thousands of rules an obstacle to providing proper care to patients
Ninety-four days into the reign of Saskatchewan’s new amalgamated health authority, its CEO says the new system is taking a thoughtful approach in transitioning to a more cohesive and patient-focused model of care.
Speaking to a Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Wednesday, Saskatchewan Health Authority CEO Scott Livingstone said much of the process will be unseen by the public, but the goal is a system that integrates what patients and their families, physicians and Indigenous residents feel is important to meet their specific needs.
One of the main obstacles to has been the massive amount of different policies across the 12 former health regions — 4,000 corporate policies and more than 10,000 clinical policies — and the barriers they created between health-care providers by establishing a variety of ways to complete tasks, he said.
He expects it will take years, but the new health authority’s plan to address this problem is to create singular policies for seamless health care no matter where the patient lives or gets treatment.
“Policies seem to be mundane but I can tell you the policies have been a direct barrier to providing proper patient care,” Livingstone said. “Those invisible boundaries that were our regional health authorities were not invisible at all to our patients or the people trying to care for them on the ground.”
The new health authority isn’t planning to reinvent the wheel, but simply take what has been most effective in Saskatchewan and pair that with other best practices from across Canada, he said.
The Saskatchewan Health Au- thority is the second largest health system in the country, and it’s the perfect time to rebuild the system and grow opportunities — especially in utilizing nurse practitioners and other family practice primary caregivers, Livingstone said.
“We don’t have to be everything to all people, which is what the system was trying to be for the last 20-30 years. We need to break out from that mould of thinking that everything is driven from acute care down.”