Action Plan seeks to hire 1,000 health care professionals
Recently, Saskatchewan Minister of Health, Paul Merriman hit the road to hear frontline workers’ views on health care. Merriman visited larger facilities around the province while Minister of Rural and Remote Health, Everett Hindley, toured northern communities.
“The biggest and most consistent message we got back is, we need more people in these health care positions,” says Merriman. The resulting Action Plan, rolled out in September, looks to hire 1,000 health care professionals over the next couple of years. The goal is to stabilize health care through recruitment, training, incentivizing and retention.
Saskatchewan’s spring budget, the largest ever for the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), signalled greater support for health care. The Action Plan reflects a $60 million investment that will be actualized in both short-term and longerterm solutions.
Over the past two years, Saskatchewan residents have become familiar with the extra challenges COVID brought to the health care system. “There is some pressure, the majority of which is in rural Saskatchewan,” Merriman observes. Some rural services are not up and running to their full capacity, which brings residents into the major cities of Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert. “We’re trying to alleviate the pressure in rural areas and that will also help out in the cities.”
Almost 100 doctors, both general practitioners and specialists, have already been recruited into the province from across Canada over the past 12 months, Merriman says. In midoctober, job postings for 175 new full-time healthcare positions went out. About 50 of those have been “enhanced” from part-time to full-time. Over the next two years, the government intends to hire another 850 internationally educated health care workers. A number of those are being recruited from the Philippines.
“We’re working with the Filipino community and recruiting some Filipinos from across the ocean to come into Saskatchewan again in some key positions, like we did about 11 years ago, to be able to help shore up and take some pressure off the system,” states Merriman. That relationship was built under then Minister Mcmorris. The Saskatchewan and Filipino governments are looking at signing a Memorandum of Understanding on recruitment.
“The Filipino community has integrated very well all across Saskatchewan from up in La Loche all the way down to Weyburn and Estevan,” Merriman reflects. “We should have actual ‘boots on the ground’ later on this calendar year.” These are continuing care aide positions for long-term care facilities, followed up with nursing positions early in the new year. The province is also on the lookout for health care workers among Ukrainian newcomers entering Canada.
The training component of the Action Plan represents a longerterm investment in the future of health care in the province. It will add 150 new nursing seats at institutions of higher learning, including the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Regina and Saskatchewan Polytechnic, for a total of 944 nursing positions in the province. “That’s substantial. I think before we formed government it was between 200 and 300, so we’ve got a huge amount of nurses that are ‘in the pipeline’ so to speak, and that’s actioned immediately this year,” adds Merriman.
Ministers Hindley and Merriman are communicating with nurses as they enter training and when they convocate. “We’re going to have more nurses graduating. We’re asking them to consider Saskatchewan as part of their future.” The province also wants to strengthen ties with Indigenous technical institutes and make it easier for high school students to envision careers in the health sector.
It is hoped that new monetary incentives of up to $50,000 over three years will make it attractive for nurses to stay in the province. These returnof-service agreements are for hard-to-recruit positions, mainly in rural and remote areas. Financial incentives already in place include the Student Loan Forgiveness Program and the Graduate Retention Program.
The province is looking at the option of adding “physician assistants” (PA) to its complement of health care personnel. The concept is fairly new to Saskatchewan. PAS practice medicine under a doctor’s supervision and perform routine examinations, order lab work and X-rays, prescribe medicines, and counsel people about their health.
To ease pressure on paramedics, Merriman has been meeting with the Paramedics Association as well as Medavie in Saskatoon. When paramedics deliver a patient to a hospital they can’t leave until the care of that patient is transferred to a doctor. In some cases, paramedics wait for hours for that transfer to take place.
“We don’t want an ambulance from out of town to be tied up in Saskatoon for an extended period of time. We are also looking to see if there’s options for Saskatoon paramedics to take the transfer of care,” says Merriman. “We’ve had some good successes. We’ve had long ER wait times but just meeting with the Paramedics Association last week, they say it’s not perfect, but it is certainly getting better.”
A couple of previously planned new Urgent Care Centres (UCC) will help ease the pressure on ERS. The Regina facility is under currently under construction and Merriman expects the Saskatoon centre will break ground soon.
A new Children’s Cancer Centre at the Regina General Hospital is a bright spot on the health care horizon. Merriman credits Yorkton MLA Greg Ottenbreit for fanning the flame on this project. “He certainly kept this on the radar to help ensure its success.” The province, along with the Regina Hospital Foundation, assisted with the project.
Saskatchewan residents have been waiting for solutions to pressures on the health care system. “I think they’re starting to see the improvements right away, but it’s a slow process,” Merriman says. “We’re starting to throttle up our surgical capacity as COVID pressures ease.” Patients’ surgical and specialist appointments are being booked, which hasn’t happened for the last two years.
This is the beginning of the process of creating a sustainable health care system, he says. “There’s lots of expectations out there and we’re trying to meet all those expectations. We want to make sure we’re supporting employee work-life balance, wellbeing and resiliency, because our health care workers have been challenged in their careers like never before and they rose to that challenge. And I can’t thank
them enough.”