Health-care union sounding the alarm about understaffing

The provincial government isn’t working hard enough to put more health-care workers on the front lines in Saskatchewan — that’s the claim from the head of SEIU-West.

Barbara Cape, the president of SEIU-West, was at the legislative building Wednesday to raise the issue of understaffing in health care all over the province. SEIU-West is a union representing some of the province’s health-care workers.

She said the lack of staff causes problems, mentioning violence toward staff members and deaths in ERs.

“That is not because frontline health-care workers don’t give a damn, it’s because there’s not enough of us,” said Cape.

The union’s workers have been without a contract for close to three years and, in a news release, the union mentioned low wages being offered and connected that to a growing list of “hard to recruit” staff.

“These are positions that cannot be filled due to a lack of realistic incentives for potential candidates to become qualified and/or the availability of people who are trained to do those functions,” reads the release.

The government is offering no wage increases for the first two years of the contract, as it has with other recent bargaining that has come to light.

Cape said she and others delivered 3,000 messages to the health minister’s office on Wednesday urging him to talk and do something about understaffing in the public health-care system.

“If you lose your frontline staff — continuing care aids, dietary staff, environmental services — the quality of care rapidly goes down. So part of the problem is that they say they’re recruiting and retaining staff, but that’s not the reality on the floor,” said Cape.

Cape repeated several times that the province and the minister need to invest in health care for the good of the province. She also had a message for the minister, but also for the people of Saskatchewan.

“Everybody likes a good tax cut, but then they also want public services,” Cape said. “So we have to actually balance out our need and our want to have good quality public health care with our desire to cut taxes.”

When asked about the problems during Question Period, Health Minister Jim Reiter talked about the people the government has managed to recruit to the province. But afterward he agreed there are some serious concerns in the system and that there are some areas for which it’s hard to recruit.

“We put the resources we can into it and we trust the officials to deal with that,” said Reiter.

He said the government is always monitoring the “hard to recruit” list but it became more front of mind last year when health officials were trying to recruit specialists for the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital in Saskatoon.

“It’s always sort of on the agenda, but recently I’ve put more onus on it just because we can see some areas in rural Saskatchewan that have been short of doctors,” Reiter said.

With the spring budget around the corner, Reiter said the government has been increasing resources to health care and that will have to continue, but he didn’t give any specifics on where money might be allocated.