Health minister defends province’s work on health-care recruitment after auditor’s report

Saskatchewan’s health minister is accepting all the recommendations from this week’s provincial auditor’s report, but is also touting the work his government has already done to recruit health-care workers to the province.

On Tuesday, the auditor released a report that, among other things, outlined work that still needed to be done quickly to deal with the vacancies in provincial health care.

In that report, the auditor talked about 2,200 empty and hard-to-recruit health-care positions in the province over the next five years — detailing 840 continuing care aides, 520 registered nurses, and 180 medical lab technicians — information the auditor said was gleaned from the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA).

The province’s Health Human Resources Action Plan details plans to recruit 1,000 workers over the next “few” years.

Health Minister Paul Merriman at first seemed skeptical of the number in the auditor’s report.

“I’ll have a deeper look at that 2,200 to see exactly where that’s coming from and if it’s identifying everything we’ve identified,” he said.

He later said the number was in line with the province’s when he found it was over five years.

In either event, Merriman pointed to the action plan to show that the province is working on the problem.

“We do have a lot of vacant positions out there that we need to fill. We’re going to fill those first — we’re going to fill the rural and remote ones, we’re going to make sure that we keep them open. And then we’re going to work on, if there are people retiring, we’ll start to work on the plan for that as well,” he said.

Merriman also said the plan is already bearing fruit, referring to the offers extended during his recent trip to the Philippines, and the net 70 doctors he said the province has brought in since the plan was announced.

“You’re starting to see the benefits of the dollars that we provided back at budget time and also the plan that was unveiled at the beginning of September,” said Merriman.

The auditor pointed out that retaining health-care workers will also have to be an important part of the plan.

Merriman believes bringing in more workers will help to retain others as they’ll have a smaller workload on their shoulders.

The provincial government has accepted all of the auditor’s recommendations.

“What we’re going to do is take the recommendations from the auditor and be able to incorporate that into our four-point plan and if there’s a new area that we need to look at and we need to expand we’ll certainly look at that,” said Merriman.

“We want to be able to get our health-care workforce up to its full complement as soon as possible.”

“Inadequate”

NDP Leader Carla Beck said the auditor’s report just confirmed how inadequate the province’s action plan really is.

“They’ve actually made a plan that has goals that would still leave us short of health-care workers. That’s deeply concerning. They’re planning to fail (and) they’re planning to continue to have health care under staffed in the province,” said Beck.

She believes the province’s plan is leaving out two important points – consultations with health-care workers, and work to retain workers already in place.

“These are workers that have been sounding the alarm far before the pandemic, for years. This is a result of this government’s inaction and it is on them to sit down and start finding the solutions,” said Beck.

The NDP leader said there needs to be a plan to address the shortages before the province sees more closures and service disruptions.