Official Opposition Leader Carla Beck and Health Critic Vicki Mowat are calling on Premier Scott Moe and his Sask. Party Government to address the ongoing surgical backlog.
According to the NDP, there are 36,000 Saskatchewan residents currently waiting for surgery.
Beck says the provincial government isn’t making it a priority.
“Since 2015, we’ve seen waitlists for surgeries balloon and we have some of the longest waitlists in the country. What do we see from Scott Moe’s government for solutions? They deflect, they talk about the past, and bypass common sense solutions,” says Beck.
Beck and Mowat were joined by provincial resident Jolene Van Alstine.
Van Alstine is 40 years old and has spent the last six years painfully suffering from her Parathyroid Hyperplasia condition.
She deals with constant nausea and vomiting, unregulated body temperature, chronic nerve and bone pain, as well as anxiety and depression.
“We have no life. She has not left the house. She has left maybe 25 times in the last 4 years. She has essentially stayed in the house because she’s too ill to go anywhere,” says her husband Miles Sundeen.
She and her husband spoke at the Legislative Building alongside the NDP officials about how she has to wait another two years before a date is set for her surgery.
This waitlist comes after roughly 6 years of seeing several doctors and being on multiple waitlists for a diagnosis.
Once she was diagnosed by an endocrinologist, she underwent surgery and immediately felt better.
However, with the nature of her condition, her symptoms returned and she now has to undergo a second procedure but has to wait at least two years before she can speak with her endocrinologist about setting a date for surgery.
Van Alstine and Sundeen continued to share that they’re losing hope. They’re finding it difficult to understand why Van Alstine is not a priority on this waitlist even though she’s been suffering and restricted to her house due to being so sick for the last six years.
Health Critic Vicki Mowat adds that the Sask. Party Government has claimed that the province’s medical waitlists are a priority but then doesn’t implement any effective solutions.
“We need to see that concerted effort to address that wait times with specialists. We haven’t seen an effort to recruit more specialists,” says Mowat.
Mowat and Beck state that the Sask. Party Government needs to put effort into recruiting more specialists and upkeeping a desirable work environment so that specialists want to come to Saskatchewan and the ones that are already here want to stay.
“We have $2.4 billion in revenues in this province. The province is doing well but the people are not doing well,” says Mowat.
