The Saskatchewan Party government’s Speech from the Throne included three new initiatives intended to improve health care for rural residents of the province.
The throne speech, read by Lieutenant-Governor Vaughn Solomon Schofield to the legislature Oct. 25, detailed a plan to deal with the challenges of growth in rural areas of Saskatchewan in terms of increased physician recruitment and retention, an improvement to the availability of emergency services and the need to put to work all health care practitioners to the best of their abilities and expertise.
Randy Weekes, minister responsible for rural and remote health, said the plan will include a loan forgiveness program that will reward physicians and nurse practitioners to accept work in rural areas on a five-year-term, the development of collaborative emergency centres in different primary health care sites and a regional locum pool of physicians for each health care region.
Weekes said the loan forgiveness package for physicians and nurse practitioners is still in the works, but as of now it will give up to $120,000 to physicians and $20,000 to registered nurses or nurse practitioners if they agree to work for five years in rural Saskatchewan. He said the recruitment and replacement of doctors is an “ongoing challenge” and this package will help, noting the province currently has a shortfall of 120 needed physicians.
The second initiative announced in the throne speech involved the innovation of collaborative emergency centres (CEC) as another form of primary health care, which will reduce the workload of rural physicians while also using the expertise of registered nurses and emergency medical personnel.
“It provides emergency care in a health care facility by a registered nurse and a paramedic with oversight by a physician by telephone or e-health and so this takes the stress off physicians to provide 24/7 emergency care,” said Weekes. “The other part of a collaborative emergency centre is patients would receive the next day appointment in a clinic so it covers off the quality of life of physicians, which is one of the issues out in rural Saskatchewan, this is not on-call 24/7.”
Weekes said the CEC is based on innovation sites set up by Nova Scotia, which he along with the CEO of the Saskatchewan Medical Association (SMA) and a few representatives of various health regions toured this summer. He said this way of providing primary health care in Nova Scotia has seen a drop of “80 per cent” of calls going to emergencies in their province, with the calls instead going to non-emergency appointments.
The third part of their plan would see a region-based locum pool of doctors that could fill in for family physicians in the province on a longer-term basis if these physicians need to be away for a lengthy period of time. The province is currently only served by a short-term replacement program of physicians by a locum pool operated through the SMA.
To read more please see the November 12 print edition of The Davidson Leader.