'Half-baked': Sask. NDP slams plan to send some hip, knee replacements out-of-province
Official Opposition Leader Carla Beck and NDP health critic Vicki Mowat called Thursday for the province to scrap its proposed private surgery plan.
"If Scott Moe would listen to the experts or even his head of surgery, he’d know that creating a private surgical clinic relying on the already scarce workforce simply won’t work,” Beck said in a news release.
“Scott Moe already had to send Saskatchewan patients out of province in the height of the pandemic for care. What’s remarkable is he’s now actually planning to do the same with this latest half-baked plan. We don’t need to rely on other provinces’ health systems to care for our own, we need to fix our public health system here at home.”
On Monday, the Sask Party government announced it had set a target to perform 7,000 more surgeries in 2022-23 than the highest-ever level, to reduce the surgical backlog.
To help meet those targets, the Saskatchewan Health Authority is exploring expansion with private sector partners. It will issue a request for proposals to build an orthopedic surgery facility focused on increasing operating room and bed capacity for in-patient joint replacements and a variety of day surgery procedures, according to a news release.
The government is also exploring a temporary, out-of-province surgical initiative for hip and knee replacements, in which the health authority would contract a private surgical facility to perform publicly funded orthopedic surgeries. It would be offered to patients on a voluntary basis, who have waited for the longest for their joint replacement procedures.
The Sask. NDP is also calling on the province to expand operating and diagnostic hours and incentivize and fund more full-time scarce positions including diagnostics, anesthesiologists and operating room nurses to help manage the surgical backlog.
Merriman said in a statement to CTV News that privately delivered surgeries have been an important part of Saskatchewan’s publicly funded surgical system for more than a decade. Since 2010-11 private clinics have delivered more than 128,000 publicly funded surgeries, he said.
"The NDP’s proposal would deny near-term relief to long-waiting surgical patients to satisfy their ideological opposition to the private delivery of publicly funded health services. Our government is taking an all of the above approach to addressing surgical wait times."
He said the province is working to expand private and public capacity in Saskatchewan over the medium and long term by recruiting more staff for the public system and procuring additional private capacity to provide low-risk elective procedures that do not require hospital stays.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
'They needed people inside Air Canada:' Police announce arrests in Pearson gold heist
Police say one former and one current employee of Air Canada are among the nine suspects that are facing charges in connection with the gold heist at Pearson International Airport last year.
House admonishes ArriveCan contractor in rare parliamentary show of power
MPs enacted an extraordinary, rarely used parliamentary power on Wednesday, summonsing an ArriveCan contractor to appear before the House of Commons where he was admonished publicly and forced to provide answers to the questions MPs said he'd previously evaded.
Leafs star Auston Matthews finishes season with 69 goals
Auston Matthews won't be joining the NHL's 70-goal club this season.
Trump lawyers say Stormy Daniels refused subpoena outside a Brooklyn bar, papers left 'at her feet'
Donald Trump's legal team says it tried serving Stormy Daniels a subpoena as she arrived for an event at a bar in Brooklyn last month, but the porn actor, who is expected to be a witness at the former president's criminal trial, refused to take it and walked away.
Why drivers in Eastern Canada could see big gas price spikes, and other Canadians won't
Drivers in Eastern Canada face a big increase in gas prices because of various factors, especially the higher cost of the summer blend, industry analysts say.
Doug Ford calls on Ontario Speaker to reverse Queen's Park keffiyeh ban
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling on Speaker Ted Arnott to reverse a ban on keffiyehs at Queen's Park, describing the move as “needlessly” divisive.
'A living nightmare': Winnipeg woman sentenced following campaign of harassment against man after online date
A Winnipeg woman was sentenced to house arrest after a single date with a man she met online culminated in her harassing him for years, and spurred false allegations which resulted in the innocent man being arrested three times.
Woman who pressured boyfriend to kill his ex in 2000s granted absences from prison
A woman who pressured her boyfriend into killing his teenage ex more than a decade ago will be allowed to leave prison for weeks at a time.
Customers disappointed after email listing $60K Tim Hortons prize sent in error
Several Tim Horton’s customers are feeling great disappointment after being told by the company that an email stating they won a boat worth nearly $60,000 was sent in error.