Martensville, Warman asking for help with health-care woes

Martensville and Warman are in an odd position when it comes to health care, according to one of the few doctors still practising there.

Dr. Allison Adamus was at the legislature on Wednesday, as a guest of the NDP, to push the government to help the communities.

Adamus explained that while Martensville, where she practises, and Warman are too close to Saskatoon to be able to get many services for themselves like a lab, more home care and childhood immunization clinics, they’re also too far for some to access services in Saskatoon.

“We’ve continually been told that we’re too close to Saskatoon (and) we don’t need additional services yet at the same time sometimes our community members are denied services in Saskatoon because we’re too far away and not part of the city,” said Adamus.

“We’re struggling to use bits and scraps of infrastructure that our city has but we have nothing that the government has put in place to allow us to bring enough services in.”
This also creates a problem with recruitment. The two communities fall into a crack between cities and smaller communities which are classed as underserved and can attract doctors by fulfilling their return-to-service agreements.

“We’re asking that we be recognized as an underserved community, that we no longer be listed as a bedroom community, that we be recognized for the services that we have, the cities that we’ve become, and have equal opportunity to recruit physicians that other communities have,” Adamus said about why she and a group of others from the communities were at the legislature.

Adamus said they turn away doctors every year because the communities don’t meet the doctors’ contracts.

As of the end of the month, Adamus said some doctors are leaving Martensville, so there will be 2 1/2 doctors for almost 12,000 people. She said they had to close the after-hours walk-in portion of their practice, and she regularly gets lab results for patients who had to go to an emergency room for things like bladder infections.

“Minor things we could have treated in our community had we had the ability to do that,” said Adamus.

She said it affects people’s care.

“Their care is not what it should be and we could probably change the way we care for them if we had access to those services,” said Adamus.

Since the pandemic started, nearly all parts of the province have had trouble with having enough doctors and nurses, but Adamus said Martensville and Warman have been dealing with this since 2014 – and the pandemic has made it worse.

“Now when everybody is looking for physicians, we’re that much more disadvantaged in trying to recruit and even retain the physicians we have,” said Adamus.

When the communities’ situation was brought up during Question Period on Wednesday, Premier Scott Moe stood up and invited them to a meeting with him, the health ministers, and their MLA after the proceedings.

Later, Moe said they were going to look at what options there would be to work together and perhaps look at something that was funded in the spring budget.

“Maybe this is a good place for the recruitment agency to start up and to get in really in supporting a community in the recruitment efforts and the ideas that they may have,” said Moe.
Moe didn’t speak to why it has taken so long for the communities’ situation to be addressed but did say that it’s a difficult discussion.

“They’re not a Lanigan or Biggar, but in the same conversation they’re not a Saskatoon, so maybe what we have to do is look (and say) is there some opportunities in the middle somewhere here so that we can incentivize some recruitment efforts to a Martensville or Warman, which is different than the other two categories that we really have?” said Moe.

Moe explained it would be challenging from a public policy perspective to have Martensville and Warman competing for doctors with towns like Lanigan and Biggar.