Saskatchewan's health-care system is being stealthily privatized under the current provincial government, says the union that represents workers.
The recent CBC news report about the health clinic in Regina offering a subscription service to enhance access to medically necessary care is not only shocking, but needs to be challenged under the Canada Health Act as a violation of the basic tenant of medicare.
I have a personal stake in this because this was the clinic where my family doctor practiced until a few months ago. But every single person in Saskatchewan, whether you have a family doctor or not, should be angry and demanding that this practice end.
Our Canadian health-care system is based on the principles that it is publicly funded, publicly administered and publicly accessible. A subscription service violates those funding and accessibility principles.
This is a symptom of a dismantling of the tenets of the health-care system, in my opinion, because it’s an extra fee (subscription) in order for someone to be fast tracked through the queue.
Not unlike Saskatchewan’s failed experiment in private MRIs and private surgeries; there is no evidence that the waitlists are being reduced, but private companies have definitely made a profit. This is a true violation of the rights of Canadian citizens to access quality health care.
We all need to have access to a family doctor, but we don’t. Growing our ability to have more doctors and nurse practitioners available is a key solution to this problem.
Ensuring that every member of the health-care team is working to their full scope of practice, including licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, and continuing care assistants, who provide frontline services, is another solution to this problem.
Creating opportunities for medical administration professionals to provide support and assistance to the health-care team is part of the solution. Hiring staff and paying them a decent, competitive wage is a solution.
As we move into the 2024 provincial election in Saskatchewan, and beyond that for other provinces, we need to hold governments responsible for defunding health care and starving it of the most needed resource: health-care professionals.
Instead, here in Saskatchewan, the government of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) are starving the health-care system of funds for day-to-day operations, but manage to afford huge and unwieldy projects, like LEAN or the Administration Information Management System (AIMS), that are driving people across all classifications out of the system; screwing up how people are paid and compensated; creating a bureaucratic spiderweb that impacts the ability to get basic supplies for facilities and surgeries to the tune of approximately $260 million.
In this October’s election the Saskatchewan Party will run on a lie of addressing health-care issues. They have done the bare minimum: they have built health-care facilities that we can’t fully staff; they have created incentives that aren’t working; and they’ve made some part-time positions into full-time positions.
But the electorate has stopped demanding answers to the question of what the hell happened to the quality of care in our health-care system.
We cannot let this opportunity pass without demanding our politicians, who are elected to represent us, meet with unions, education institutions and employers to create a comprehensive health human resource plan that actually talks to the health-care professionals about what is needed to provide care to the public.
If we don’t pay attention — we will lose our health-care system to privatization by stealth.
Barbara Cape is the president of SEIU-West, which represents employees who work in Saskatchewan’s health-care system.
Published: Saskatoon StarPhoenix September 4, 2024
