Former police chief Clive Weighill shares details of security review at Sask. health facilities

Former Saskatoon police chief Clive Weighill is leading an independent review of security and safety at Saskatchewan’s health-care facilities.

Weighill, who also previously served as Saskatchewan’s chief coroner, joined The Evan Bray Show on Monday to explain how the review started and what the process will entail.

Read more:

• Sask. hospital review begins under former provincial coroner, Saskatoon police chief
• Sask. government aims to improve safety at hospitals through independent review
• Pregnant Indigenous woman died after extended wait for care at Saskatoon hospital, family says

Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: How did this come to be for you?

WEIGHILL: The contract is with Buckingham Security and Investigations, and Rod Buckingham, who owns the company, contacted me and said there’s a chance that he may be getting a contract for this if I’d be interested. I’ve been in the public sector a lot of years, as you well know. The last couple of years I’ve been in the private sector, and this was an opportunity, I think, for me to get back into my comfort zone, working in the public arena again.

What is it that you’re hoping to do?

WEIGHILL: It’s a very wide-ranging look at what’s going on within the Saskatchewan Health Authority, right across the province. So within the scope, we’ll be doing getting information from a jurisdictional scan. We want to see what’s going on across Canada and maybe find some best practices. We’re going to look at the protective services officers themselves, their training, and any development that they may need there. This is really a look at safety for patients, for visitors or for the staff within the Saskatchewan Health Authority, whether that be doctors and nurses or protective services officers themselves, so one of the main things on this was going to be talking to stakeholders. So we’ll be reaching out to First Nations organizations and new-Canadian organizations, doctors, nurses, protective services staff, a very wide range on what we’re going to try to cover here in the next six months or so.

And is it fairly broad in terms of geography? Is it just the big centres, or is this province-wide?

WEIGHILL: We’ve got 26 sites that the ministry has asked us to look at, so we’re going right from Estevan in the south, right as far north as Île-à-la-Crosse.

And in that work, is it health-care centres, is it hospitals, is it anything health related?

WEIGHILL: Well, there are some smaller health-care facilities that aren’t the main hospitals that we’ll be looking at, but primarily we’re going to be looking at Regina, Saskatoon, Prince Albert, the larger cities, and then some of the smaller cities around the province, and some of the larger towns that have hospitals, and we’ll be actually doing some site visits there, talking to the staff, looking at the physical security of the building, talking to people about their own safety and just putting all the pieces together provincially.

How long will this review take? And are you working with a team of people, or is this first piece just yourself?

WEIGHILL: This is absolutely a team effort. Rod’s given me about 30 people that I can work with as a team, and so we have some subject matter experts, some are experts on training, some are on experts on use of force, some are experts on cameras or screening devices and organizations, some are people that are really good at talking to communities, so we can get some good stakeholder input as well. So I have about 30 people at my disposal. We’ve divvied that up into special teams for special projects to move ahead and try and get this done as quickly as we can.

So will it be hospital and hospital groundwork that you do that would be part of the scope?

WEIGHILL: Not only are we looking at internal issues within hospital facilities or SHA facilities, we’re looking at the perimeter around them as well, too. It’s full encompassing, but let’s look at what’s going on outside the buildings, that’s what we have there for physical security, and I mean infrastructure by that. And then let’s look what we have inside for the security for the patients, the visitors and the staff that work there.

Do you expect, as you’re doing this work, that there might be some low-hanging fruit, some easy-to-fix issues that could get tweaked along the way, or will it all wait until the final report is out?

WEIGHILL: I’m sure that we’ll find some. There’s always a little bit of low-hanging fruit in any review that you do. We’ll be giving the ministry an interim report around 90 days into it, so we’ll see what comes up in the first 90 days. What’s important right now, I think, is we have to go out and see really what is happening right now, so that we can do a comparison. And it’s almost back to the old-fashioned gap analysis that was around four years ago, saying you look at what you have now, what the future state would be, and then try to fill that gap with some recommendations.

Will some best practices from outside of the borders of Saskatchewan factor into this at all?

WEIGHILL: Absolutely. The jurisdictional scan is Canada-wide.

Will the final report that you give to government to Saskatchewan Health Authority be publicly available?

WEIGHILL: I haven’t discussed that at all with the ministry. I guess that would be a decision that they’ll make. We’ll do the report, fulfill our contract, and then it will be given to the ministry.

Is there anything that people listening to this should know? Is there a way people can help? Do you have a line where you can take people’s information if they have something that they would like you to look at?

WEIGHILL: Yes. The news release that came out last week, it has an email address in there. It’s service@buckinghamsecurity.com, so if anyone has any concerns or any input that they may have, we’re certainly welcome to entertain that. One of the biggest things that we’re going to try to do and tackle is, there’s thousands of nurses in the province, but you can’t talk to every individual nurse, so we have to find some ways to get information in. I’ll be working with the unions for nurses soon. I’ll be working with CUPE. Protective services officers fall under SGEU, so there’ll be a lot of work with the unions as well, to help us gather some information.

I’m guessing, through the work you do, it may highlight room for expansion, co-operation, things like that?

WEIGHILL: Yes. We have to do a service review on the different models that are going on across the province. Some hospitals have their security from the health authority, some have third-party security companies working for them, and some cities, like Regina, have police and community safety officers mixed in with the protective services officers there. So there’s different models that are occurring across the province.

But you will not be looking at anything around the delivery of health-care services, correct?

WEIGHILL: That’s very important, and there’s a few misunderstandings about that. We are not looking into individual cases or complaints that have happened in the past. There’s other areas that will investigate those, and we will not be looking into any of the health-care procedures that happen within an emergency or within a hospital. This is strictly to look at the safety and security of the patients, the visitors and the staff that work there.