Weyburn mayor frustrated over health service disruptions

From late Saturday night to early Sunday morning this weekend, the closest emergency health services to people in Weyburn will be nearly an hour away.

The emergency room at Weyburn General Hospital will be closed from 11 p.m. on Saturday to 7:30 a.m. Sunday due to a lack of nurses.

This is the second such disruption in Weyburn this summer and the city’s mayor, Marcel Roy, is frustrated.

“People have said to me, ‘Why are we even building a hospital when we can’t even keep our emergency room open?’ ” asked Roy, referring to the new hospital for Weyburn that is currently in the procurement stage.

“We’re supposed to be a city. And I know that everybody’s supposed to share and share alike, but we produce oil (and) we produce massive amounts of revenue for the province, and we can’t even get a doctor (and) can’t even have an emergency room open on the weekends?”

It’s not just these service disruptions. Roy said there are massive problems with the entire health-care system in Saskatchewan — and Roy said it wasn’t just COVID that did it.

“The whole system was absolutely broken, we had a small blip in the system and all of a sudden, the whole system went down,” said Roy.

In Weyburn, Roy said it takes three weeks to even get in to see a doctor. He wonders where everything — the services and providers — went.

Roy has spoken with other mayors and he says they’re ignored by the decision-makers in government “all the way through” — he points to what the government decided to do with its windfall resource revenue, which didn’t include investments in health care.

“We’re making record amounts of money on potash (and) record amounts of money on oil. That’s why they’re handing all of this money, but where’s our medical system?” asked Roy.

He said he doesn’t know how the government can have even the faintest idea that the system is working.

“(Government officials are) talking about they balanced the budget and all this type of stuff, and it’s just like … I am absolutely, totally disillusioned with what the premier’s doing and how their health care (is working), and Minister (Paul) Merriman,” Roy said. “I don’t think they even have a clue of what is going on in the province.”

Roy said government is good at blaming and pointing fingers and then nothing gets done.

“And who suffers the worst? The citizens themselves are the ones suffering from this,” said Roy.

He spoke about the southeast having a lot of industrial work.

“If there’s industrial accidents, people have to be able to get into the emergency room to deal with this and they can’t get in there. We have kids and elderly down here that need to be able to get into (ERs),” said Roy.

The Saskatchewan Health Authority said in a statement the disruptions in Weyburn recently are due to “multiple temporary vacancies” in the emergency department.

The authority said there are new hires in Weyburn who will start their orientations in the coming weeks and “this will hopefully minimize the risk of future disruptions.”

People in need of emergency services in the Weyburn area during the disruption can go to Estevan (which is 54 minutes away), Arcola (which is just over an hour away) or the two hospitals in Regina (which is an hour and 15 minutes away).