Mayor says residents are scared as hospital service disruption continues in Kamsack

Health is no laughing matter, but Kamsack’s mayor offered a bitter chuckle when asked about the state of the town’s hospital.

Nancy Brunt said there are no acute care beds open in Kamsack right now. The town’s emergency room is running on limited hours — only 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday — and its four full-time doctors still cannot admit patients to their own hospital.

The emergency room hours are an improvement, Brunt acknowledged, from the previous closure time of 4:30 p.m.

In mid-July, a posting made to the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s website said there would be a “temporary service disruption” to the Kamsack hospital beginning July 13 and lasting “until further notice,” though the posted disruption was end-dated for Oct. 31.

The disruptions specifically affect the acute care services at the hospital. The health authority cited staffing challenges in the advisory, and said emergency services would still be available, but only during certain, reduced hours.

The notice also stated that lab and X-ray services are still available by appointment, and inpatient services will not be available at the facility. A list of available emergency services included in the advisory referred patients to hospitals in Preeceville, Canora and Yorkton.

“To say that our town is frustrated is putting it mildly,” Brunt said in an interview with 650 CKOM.

The mayor said the biggest need for the community right now is getting back its hospital beds — specifically for acute care — and hiring more nurses and lab technicians.

But having the hospital so significantly restrained in the services it can offer in the meantime is wreaking havoc on the Kamsack community, according to Brunt.

Personal care homes that used to transfer patients to the hospital two minutes down the road are now having to send patients by ambulance to communities an hour or more away, Brunt said.

Patients hoping for services as simple as antibiotics to fight an infection or bloodwork are also having to make those extra travel and time accommodations to receive care in another community.

“If something happens in the middle of the night, they’re gone for the whole night, hours on end, sitting in a Yorkton emergency room,” Brunt said, noting wait times can stretch up to eight hours.

“It’s just so frustrating. Our doctors are going to work in other ER departments. Our doctors have to admit their patients to other hospitals, which means their regular GP is no longer taking care of them. They have a stranger taking care of them.”

Brunt said one woman from Kamsack has spent nearly a month in Preeceville awaiting surgery, which will ultimately be performed in Regina.

“She wants to be at home in our Kamsack hospital where her friends and family can visit her,” Brunt said.

Any person who has spent time in a hospital knows how horrible and isolating the experience can be, Brunt said, pointing to “the loneliness, the depression, (and) the despair that comes with that.”

The mayor said it isn’t fair that Kamsack residents are having to travel so far for care, and it’s equally unfair for residents in other towns to be delayed in receiving their own care because of it.

“We’re overwhelming the other hospitals with our emergency patients,” Brunt said, noting that sometimes up to 10 patients from Kamsack can be in another community at night.

With the demand so high for medical services that cannot be accessed in their own community at the present time, Brunt said ambulance services are being “overwhelmed.” Paramedics are spending an hour transporting a patient to another community, the mayor explained, sometimes up to six hours waiting with them to be admitted, and then commuting back to Kamsack.

Seniors have the cost of those trips covered, but Brunt noted that harvest season is a time when many accidents requiring medical intervention tend to spring up. If an accident happens outside the hours of operation for the local emergency room, she said those patients would have to travel themselves to another community for help, or pay for the ambulance to take them.

“They’re scared! They’re scared to get sick,” Brunt said.

When the disruption of services was first announced in July, Brunt said Everett Hindley, the province’s minister of rural and remote health, visited Kamsack. Since then, the only word Brunt has received from the government was a brief note from an MLA responding to an email she sent in early September, detailing the issues.

Brunt said all she knows right now is that the provincial government said it is working to help get more staff for the hospital.

“We have a beautiful community here. We are very welcoming. We would welcome nurses and lab techs with open arms,” she said. “We really, desperately, want them here.”

Last week, the provincial government launched its Health Human Resources Action Plan, a $60-million program aiming to add more than 1,000 employees to Saskatchewan’s health-care system.