Health minister discusses plan to cut down surgical wait lists

Health Minister Paul Merriman is defending Saskatchewan’s plan to cut down surgical wait lists, eliminate the surgical backlog and beef up hospital capacity.

He joined Gormley to discuss the details and field a few questions Friday morning.

In the interview, Gormley pointed at the government’s timeline: It hopes to achieve wait lists of just three months for surgeries by 2030.

Gormley questioned Merriman why it would take so long, considering the Saskatchewan Party government achieved similar wait times just a couple of years after it was first elected.

“It’s just a capacity issue … There are many things that have to happen, from the diagnosis to the recovery of the surgery …,” Merriman said.

“The surgery is a huge part of that, but we want to make sure that we have everything post-surgery ready, so we have to look at different options for that.”

The minister also pointed out these are very different circumstances than when his party was first elected under then-leader Brad Wall.

“We also have to look at our surgical capacity. Our health-care system has been through something that we’ve never experienced before (with COVID-19). This is not something that we had leading up to 2007 when we had the privilege of forming government. We had the capacity (then), we just had to utilize it,” Merriman said.

Now, he said, things are much different.

“Our health-care workers have been stretched over the last 20 to 22 months. We’re trying to stage this in so we can make sure that it is a very controlled but a very safe process, to make sure that we can do those surgeries in a very reasonable amount of time,” he continued.

That being said, Merriman said he understands people have been waiting longer than he would like.

“People have been waiting,” he said. “We understand that, and we want to make sure that they can get in as soon as they can.”

One of the strategies the government will use to try and cut back on wait lists — as well as to heighten the health-care system’s capacity in general — is to hire more health-care workers and add more ICU beds.

“(We’re) working with (Immigration and Career Training) Minister (Jeremy) Harrison on recruitment internationally,” Merriman said. “We’re looking at going back to the Philippines to see if we can recruit some more continuing care aids, RNs and potentially ICU nurses.

“Where we saw our challenge in the last few months was mostly in our high acute and our ICU capacity.”

However, that will still be a gradual process.

“We can’t take somebody that’s right out of school and put them right into a very stressful ICU,” Merriman said. “We want to stage them in there so that they’re doing the best job that they possibly can.”