Weyburn is getting into a tight spot, medically speaking, but this is not how things were supposed to be here.
The city’s contingent of doctors are being depleted, as physicians are leaving, and residents are being left in a bad position of not having any access to a doctor here.
As a major centre in the southeast region, Weyburn has been waiting for a new acute care hospital for a long time, as it has been long known that the Weyburn General Hospital has some major issues and problems.
It has not been an adequate health care facility for many years now, thus the community’s efforts have been ongoing for a while with fundraising through the Weyburn and District Hospital Foundation.
The most recent word from Weyburn’s MLA, Dustin Duncan, is that the location of where the promised new hospital will be is now in the hands of the provincial cabinet, which will also determine how many beds and what services this facility will have.
The question that arises now is, why are doctors leaving here if we are going to be getting a new facility? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
One reason may be that the doctors who were here were not adequately supported with enough fellow physicians to make scheduling in the ER at the hospital more reasonable and not so onerous a duty.
What’s happening instead is that doctors are leaving the community for somewhere else so they don’t have to work unreasonably long hours.
This presents a bad situation for Weyburn residents who are now without a physician, and for any future hospital project — how do you construct a new health care facility if there is a lack of doctors to man it? And how do you attract new doctors unless you actually build that new facility?
This has become a Catch-22 situation, and the only way out of it is for the Saskatchewan Health Authority to pay some attention to what is going on here. When the SHA was asked what residents are supposed to do now, the suggestion was that residents could look to other communities that are an hour to an hour and a half away to consult a doctor, namely Regina, Moose Jaw or Estevan.
Has Weyburn become an unimportant little town that we now have to drive for an hour just to see a doctor? Is that proper health care for a city of over 11,000 people?
What happened to Weyburn’s status as the “best city to live in on the Prairies”? If this southeast hub is really that good a place to live, then why are doctors leaving?
Do they want residents to treat the Emergency Room like a medical clinic, because people have nowhere else to go? Health authorities have been pretty clear in the past, that this is not an appropriate use of the ER — so, we need more doctors, and we need them now.
