Four hospitals on bypass: Opposition wants more health-care transparency

The Saskatchewan NDP is pointing once again at the province’s struggling health-care system and calling for more transparency from the government.

On Wednesday, the Official Opposition released a photo that was leaked to the party of a Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) dashboard from Tuesday of last week. It showed four hospitals in different parts of the Saskatchewan on bypass, meaning they weren’t taking any but the most serious patients.

(Saskatchewan NDP/Submitted)

Two of Saskatoon’s three hospitals were on bypass at that time: St. Paul’s Hospital (SPH) and Royal University Hospital (RUH). So were Yorkton Regional Hospital (YRH) and Cypress Regional Hospital (SCH) in Swift Current.

“From what I’ve heard, that is not an abnormal occurrence,” NDP Health Critic Vicki Mowat explained.

“This is a typical snapshot of what a day looks like, so it wasn’t sort of cherry-picked out of the files. This is a daily report that is received on critical incidents within our health-care system.”

RUH, in particular, is shown at 106 per cent capacity at that time with -1 available vent capacity and beds.

In the viewable notes for SCH in the photo, it read “short staff going into tonight, cannot admit” then it’s cut off.

Mowat said both hospitals with ICUs in Saskatoon being on bypass is of critical concern because that means the people in the province’s biggest centre couldn’t be cared for there.

“So it means that patients are at higher risk (and) that they can’t get the care that they need. It puts paramedics in a really difficult spot of trying to figure out how to care for these patients as well,” explained Mowat.

“It is a sign of a system that’s in crisis.”

Mowat said she’d spoken to a steelworker who lives near a potash mine and when there’s an emergency, they don’t call 911; instead they open up Google to try to find out which emergency rooms are open.

Mowat and the NDP want the provincial government to do more to fix problems like low staffing that are causing the closures, but they also want the province to make information easily and publicly available so people can know the capacity at hospitals in the province and know when they’re accepting patients.

Health Minister Paul Merriman argued that at least some of that information is available in Saskatoon. There’s a flowcast document that is updated every five minutes showing acute care capacity at all three of the city’s hospitals – but it doesn’t indicate if or when a hospital is on bypass.

Merriman said he’s asked the SHA to duplicate that reporting for Regina as soon as possible. He couldn’t speak to moving that out to other areas of the province, only saying it would be more complicated and that he would talk to the Rural and Remote Health Minister Everett Hindley about it.

Merriman said he hadn’t seen the photo so he couldn’t speak to it specifically.

“If you take a snapshot in time, if you look at anything within any system … it’s not an accurate portrayal. It’s a snapshot versus seeing the entire movie,” he said.

Merriman said the government has recognized there are pressures in ICUs, and it’s trying to address that. But it all comes back to people.

“We can build the rooms but we need to have the people to manage those ICUs that are highly skilled across the system and that’s why we’re bringing people in with our human resource plan,” he said.

There was at least one note in the leaked photo about a lack of staff, a problem Merriman said the government is still working on fixing. He counted out 175 doctors hired in the last 19 months, 117 nurses hired since December, and 420 conditional offers made to international employees.

“We’ve had a lot of great successes, but I think we also have to keep this in perspective of we are bouncing back from the largest health challenge that our province has ever seen (COVID-19). And similar to other provinces, we’re all trying to grapple with that, and around the world,” said Merriman.

When asked about people going to search engines or social media to find out if any of their local hospitals or ERs are open, Merriman instead encouraged people to call the ERs for that information or call 811 to find out if they should go to an ER or if they can wait.

“What one individual might see as an emergency might not be with a registered nurse who’s trained in this. They might say, ‘Yes, you can do A, B and C, and go see your doctor tomorrow,’ ” said Merriman.