REGINA— Kipling’s mayor is adding her voice to growing concerns over rural health care after another temporary closure of the community’s emergency room.
Patricia Jackson travelled to the legislature on Thursday, the same week her community’s ER shut down again because of staffing shortages. The Kipling facility was closed on Wednesday, and it also shut its doors on Nov. 3, from Nov. 7 to 12 and again on Nov. 19 and Nov. 20.
“That’s nine days where the emergency room wasn’t open in Kipling in November alone,” said Keith Jorgenson, the Saskatchewan NDP’s deputy health shadow minister. “This is unacceptable, it’s dangerous and Scott Moe still refuses to lift a finger despite overwhelming evidence that health care is worse now than it’s ever been.”
Jackson said the closures leave residents uneasy, especially given the community’s industrial activity.
“We’re in the oil patch. We have been blessed. We have not had a major oops,” Jackson said. “But some day we might have, and we need to know that we’ve got the services available if and when that happens.”
Rural health-care staff have raised alarms since the Saskatchewan Health Authority adopted a new guideline on Oct. 29 that requires ERs to remain open as long as one registered nurse is on site.
The SHA began posting daily online notices of ER disruptions around the same time. Frontline workers say they were not consulted and argue the change is meant to create what they call the “illusion of health care.”
Kipling’s challenges have been compounded by repeated closures at the Arcola emergency room, the facility patients are typically directed to when Kipling’s ER is unavailable.
Jackson said the instability has affected both residents and the local economy.
“If people go off to another community because they're sick, they end up buying fuel, having lunch, maybe picking up groceries,” she said. “Ours is not a huge community. It’s a little under one thousand one hundred people. Our businesses need their business in order to survive.”
According to the Saskatchewan NDP, rural emergency room closures across Saskatchewan have risen by 800 per cent since Moe became premier.
“Saskatchewan, we don’t have to settle for this,” Jorgenson said. “We are the birthplace of Medicare; however, Scott Moe and the Sask. Party have driven us to last place and they can’t be trusted to fix things.
“We need big, bold change to end the crisis and get rural Saskatchewan residents the health care they need and deserve. The Saskatchewan NDP will deliver that for you.”
