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Rural healthcare remains in the spotlight for the opposition New Democratic Party as they continue to watchdog what they say is a deteriorating situation. At the top of the list of concerns is the report of an emergency room’s failure to have an on-site physician while it was declared open.
A release from the NDP says that the Southwest Integrated Healthcare Facility in Maple Creek was to have been closed for eight hours given there was no physician in attendance. The release goes on to state that a posting on the Town of Maple Creek’s Facebook page indicates the closure was averted because “SHA (Saskatchewan Health Authority) has secured a virtual physician.”
“Imagine arriving at a hospital in need of emergency care only to discover there are no doctors present,” said Keith Jorgenson, Saskatchewan NDP Associate Shadow Health Minister. “Virtual care can be helpful in many circumstances, but there is a time and place for it. An ER is not that place.
Every day it’s a different horror story with this government and what it tries to pass off as healthcare. This is incompetence, it’s a failure of leadership and people are going to get hurt.”
The original closure notice had people requiring emergency care rerouting to Medicine Hat in Alberta, an hour away to the west.
The release came on July 22, the same day that Watrous Hospital also experienced a closure, one of numerous over the past few months. The NDP noted “spotty” services in other rural centres like Kipling and Davidson.
Jorgenson reiterated the government’s failure to adequately address the situation.
“People are turning up every day to rural emergency rooms to find them closed, and now even those that are open may not have a doctor present,” he said. “I am calling on the government to come clean today on just how many emergency rooms are ‘open’ in Saskatchewan right now without the proper frontline healthcare staff needed to provide safe and proper care.”