REGINA — Opposition New Democrats have announced a new health-care consultation aimed at bringing "bold new ideas" to the table to fix the system.
Outside the legislature Monday, NDP Health critic Meara Conway and Rural and Remote Health critic Jared Clarke announced the launch a province-wide health-care consultation starting with the launch of the website YourCareYourSay.ca. They said that website would contain surveys for families and patients, for health-care providers, and for frontline leaders.
Conway said they will also be soliciting feedback and meeting with the most significant stakeholders in health-care across the province and hear from people from every part of this province.
They say they will be sending solicitation letters to all major stakeholders in health-care this week and plan to meet with them one on one. They will also be going into communities and touring facilities, and “banging down every door,” said Conway, to talk to people about their experience of health care in Saskatchewan.
The NDP have had health-care tours and consultations before, but Conway insists this one is different.
“The focus is on solutions, and not just tinkering on the sidelines. The focus is on big, bold change,” said Conway.
“Often those meetings touch on solutions, yes, but they touch on the problems with health care, and there are no shortage of them. And I think we've been very effective at prosecuting the changes we've seen in health care for the worst. Every day there's a new story about crisis and chaos in our health-care system. But we've also heard from people that they are hungry for solutions. And so this is going to be singularly focused on solutions, and again, not just tinkering on the sidelines, but big, bold ones that have the capacity to fundamentally improve our health-care system.”
The NDP news conference featured the usual criticisms of the Sask Party government’s handling of health care, including claims of being last in health care in Canada. But what was particularly new was the NDP’s criticisms of the centralization of health care under the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
“Since the Sask Party scrapped local health regions in 2017 and centralized everything under the Saskatchewan Health Authority, decisions have been made in Regina behind closed doors instead of among communities by frontline people who know what they need,” Conway said.
“The result is a system that's bloated, it's unco-ordinated, and more focused on hiding problems than fixing them.”
Clarke echoed the concerns.
“In rural and remote Saskatchewan, the crisis in our health-care system is especially dire,” Clarke said.
“Families driving hours just to see a doctor, emergency rooms closing without notice, and parents wondering whether an ambulance will be there when they call for help. That's the reality after 18 years of Sask Party mismanagement and incompetence. By amalgamating health authorities in 2017, they took away the health-care decision power, the powers of decision-making from local communities. The Sask Party's plan has failed. We owe it to future generations to rebuild health care from the ground up.”
When asked if possibly breaking up the SHA and returning to regional health authorities was among those on the table, Conway pointed to frontline voices not being heard.
“Look, we know that we used to lead the nation in health care. We know that one of the things that has happened under the SaskParty is this amalgamation under the SHA. And we do hear that frontline voices are too often shut out. We're going to be looking at all ways of making sure that those frontline voices, those local community needs, are at the forefront of reform in health care.”
Conway adds that “a lot of things have changed while the Sask Party party has been in power. You know, we have political insiders leading our health-care system instead of health-care workers. That's another thing that's changed under the Sask Party. And we'll have more to say about that in the coming days this week.”
She told reporters that “everything was on the table” in the consultations but added she did not want to commit to anything because "we really want those solutions to be coming from the people on the frontlines."
"We are not going to be ruling out anything. We want to look at everything. We want this to be meaningful. And we want it to be effective."
These consultations are being launched with just a month to go before the Legislature returns to session, but Conway expects it to go on much longer until the spring. Conway said they have given themselves a minimum of six months, and said "if we feel that we need to do more, we will."
"We expect that the consultation will take us across the province, maybe even to other places where big, bold ideas are pursued in other jurisdictions. And that's the starting point. We may need to pivot, but the consultation portion of this will take a minimum of six months, perhaps more.”
Government dismisses latest NDP health tour as "consultations that never end"
In a statement the Sask Party government trashed the NDP latest plans for what they characterized as "yet another listening tour" on health care.
"Today, the lost and reckless NDP proved once again that they have no ideas or solutions for health care in Saskatchewan. Instead, after nearly two decades in opposition, all the NDP have to offer are empty slogans and yet another listening tour, their fourth in two years. Their 2023 'solutions tour' yielded a 2024 election platform that didn’t contain a single concrete proposal to improve the health care in Saskatchewan and planned to spend less on health care in 2025-26 than our government is investing this year."
Their statement said that their government's Ministers of Health and MLAs "regularly engage with constituents and health-care workers across the province and from those conversations we are taking meaningful action and delivering concrete results."
The government statement pointed to creation of 77 new and enhanced frontline health-care positions and 47 new and enhanced clinical manager roles due to a $10.4 million reduction in administrative positions at the SHA this year; over 41,000 patients being seen at the new Regina Urgent Care Centre in its first year of operation; an increase in doctors by 346 and the number of nurses by 2,083 since launching the Health Human Resources Action Plan in 2022; recruiting 463 high-priority health-care professionals to 70 rural and remote communities through the Rural and Remote Recruitment Incentive; and the avoidance of over 2,700 service disruptions in rural and remote communities in the past 17 months through programs such as the Virtual Physician Program and Point-of-Care Testing.
"While the NDP continue with their consultations that never end, our government is making record investments, recruiting hundreds of new health-care workers, reducing administration costs and using innovation to keep care closer to home."
