Union files grievance over new Saskatchewan Health Authority program

The province’s nurses are being encouraged by the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) to take a close look at their paycheques Thursday after the tumultuous and brief launch of the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s (SHA) new program.

The Administrative Information Management System (AIMS) was supposed to deal with things like payroll and scheduling and, according to Health Minister Paul Merriman, amalgamate 80 different systems from the former health regions.

“The enormity of this, of some systems that were as old as 50 years old, we’ve got union agreements, we’ve got seniority, we’ve got 45,000 individuals — this is a massive undertaking,” Merriman told Gormley guest host Taylor MacPherson.

“And once the SHA identified that there were some problems in the scheduling … that was when the SHA made the decision to pause it for right now.”

The problems were identified within days of implementation and the program was paused before the end of last week.

“The main problem was there were some discrepancies between the scheduling — there were some challenges there — and the payroll. So we wanted to make sure that our staff was paid properly (and) that the scheduling was done,” said Merriman.

The minister said patient safety was the No. 1 priority and they couldn’t have it that people weren’t scheduled to take care of patients.

According to the SUN website, the union leadership warned its members and local presidents that it was expecting problems with the rollout.

As of Wednesday last week, the union posted online that hundreds of members were experiencing “significant issues” with AIMS that it felt were in breach of the application of articles and practices in the collective agreement. Therefore the union filed a grievance with the province.

The problems included scheduling of hours and work, casual callouts, access to and bidding on shifts, and access and accuracy of earned banks. The union wrote it was also hearing frustrations about the time it was taking members to navigate the system.

On Friday, the union posted that the implementation was paused and the health authority had told it that it’s working to get employees’ time and schedules entered into their old systems to get employees paid as accurately as possible.

Merriman said the problems were getting ironed out but didn’t know when AIMS would be implemented again.