A desperate situation at Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital: Nurses union

By Derek Craddock

Saskatchewan’s Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital is in a critical situation, like nothing ever seen before by nurses in that facility.

That’s according to the president of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN), who said staff at the hospital are not able to cope with the number of sick kids.

“They’ve seen things get remarkably worse in the last six to eight weeks, and it’s reached a point where there are no more rooms. They’ve used every available space,” said SUN president Tracy Zambory.

“There’s a lot of morale distress with registered nurses who work there because they feel they cannot give these kids the care they require.”

Zambory noted this is not just children being admitted for flu, COVID-19 or RSV, but dealing with severe illnesses, chronic sickness, and health illness.

She said the one thing that needs to happen to remedy the situation is for all parties to sit together and take the matter seriously.

“Premier (Scott) Moe, Minister (Paul) Merriman, and Minister (Everett) Hindley need to sit down with us and create a Nursing Task Force. We’ve been calling on this task force to be stood up for months,” she said.

Zambory believes the task force can help determine how nurses can manage the crisis point and once they are through, how they can rebuild the system at the hospital.

“Our members right now are working in a collapsed situation at JPCH and it is quite dangerous what they are being expected to do,” said Zambory.

In an emailed statement, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) said it’s meeting with the provincial network daily to ensure every child has access to care, including activating contingency plans which can provide additional staffed beds or transfer a child to an appropriate acute children’s unit.

“Sixteen additional beds, 11 in the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital and five in Regina General Hospital, are actively being added to the Pediatric network to increase access to care for children,” the statement reads. “Incremental staff have been added at peak times into areas that are seeing increased utilization, such as the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Emergency Department, Yorkton, and Moose Jaw Acute Care Pediatrics.”

Zambory added this is a situation facing all health centres and not just the JPCH. Despite promises by the government to work on recruitment to fix the health-care system, she said things have only gotten worse.

“What we’re not talking about is retention,” Zambory said. “The registered nurses there cannot continue to work under these conditions, they cannot be mistreated and ignored and this is what continues to happen.”