‘It has not translated at all to the front line:’ SUN skeptical of SHA action plan

On Thursday, the Saskatchewan Health Authority talked about the progress that has been made on the action plans to deal with overcapacity issues in Regina and Saskatoon hospitals.

But the head of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses is telling a different story.

SUN president Tracy Zambory said that just one day before the health authority presented the updates, the union got a call from members at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.

She said they explained there were 80 patients who were in the waiting room and there weren’t any beds available.

“The real distressing part of that entire thing was that three of those patients had, together, been 120 hours waiting to get admitted to (the mental health centre) in the emergency room, so they’d been on a stretcher that long,” said Zambory.

Those numbers mean the ER was 300 per cent overcapacity, according to Zambory.

Pointing to that situation and another similar one that happened the week before at Saskatoon’s St Paul’s Hospital, she said the health authority’s action plans haven’t done much to help the situations.

“While they tout and extol how well they’ve done, it has not translated at all to the front line,” she said.

The action plans were put together shortly after fire marshals warned hospitals in both Regina and Saskatoon about overcrowding leading to fire code violations.

Zambory called it a systemic failure.

“It’s the emergency room that’s showing us that, yet again, we have a provincial government (and) a health authority that are turning their face away from the problems,” she said. “They’re choosing to ignore rather than do something that’s substantive.”

She said much of the action plans were recycled material from different announcements that had been made over the years around beds and staffing.
Zambory said there are problems around staffing for doctors and nurses, the system not using nurse practitioners the way they should be used, and a lack of dealing with needs in rural areas.

“Until we actually address these issues in the proper way, we’re just going to continue to see these things happen,” she said.

Zambory thinks the problems are too deep and have gone on too long for any immediate fixes to be possible. But she says it’s not impossible if the health authority and government talk to people on the front lines and get some initiatives and plans together.

She said it’ll take money and political will but if they all agree to work together, they should be to find their way through these problems.