| The health care system in Saskatchewan received
a strange mixture of both more cash along with job and bed cuts
last week in a move that simply doesn't make sense. The provincial government injected $19 million more funding into the system, with Sun Country getting just under $900,000 of that money, but also cut long-term care beds across the province. In Weyburn, the cuts mean 12 of the beds in the brand-new Tatagwa View long-term care facility will be used for mental health patients, to be moved out of their current home in the Community Services building on the Souris Valley grounds. And financially, even with this extra funding, Sun Country is still going to have a shortfall in their budget. Sun Country says they will still be able to accommodate all of the long-term care patients to be transferred from Souris Valley this fall, once construction of Tatagwa View is complete. The cuts in long-term care beds don't make sense from many perspectives, the first of which is a look at the demographics of our society and province. Common sense alone tells us that as the Baby Boomers age, the demographic of older people is going to get larger, not smaller - cutting down the capacity of beds which can handle these patients in their later years simply makes no sense. One result, which should fly in the face of the NDP's so-called championing of health care issues, is that since there are fewer beds in the publicly-funded facilities for long-term care patients - and these patients have to go somewhere if they are unable to live and be cared for at home - the alternative is to go to privately-owned care homes. The unions have already voiced their opposition to this scenario, but it's their own government who is forcing the situation. The second perspective is that of the long-term view to the future; with the federal Romanow report and numerous other reports all recommending an overhaul of sorts of the health care system, does it make sense to do major cuts to a system before any kind of system review is done? For example, what about this province's notoriously long waiting lists? How is making cuts going to improve that situation? Also, many of the reports recommend a beefing-up of home care as part of reducing the reliance of the public on our health care facilities. When beds and services are cut, forcing many seniors to go on long waiting lists and remain at home, but no money is put into home care, where does that leave this vulnerable sector of our society? Out in the cold with no one to look after them, and disastrously long wait times to get the care they need. Before the province gets any deeper into this scenario, they need to take a long, hard look at where health care is going, and whether they are really pursuing the vision that medicare father Tommy Douglas had of publicly-accessible, publicly-funded health care. - G.N. |
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