‘Terrible:’ Regina hospital at risk for bypass

Health-care workers are yet again sounding the alarm and asking for help from the Saskatchewan government.

Radiological technologists were joined by NDP Rural and Remote Health Critic Matt Love to announce that Regina’s Pasqua Hospital and its diagnostic services are at risk of bypass.

Bashir Jalloh, the president of the CUPE local representing health-care workers in Saskatchewan, is getting tired of constantly asking for help and seeing no changes.

“This is not our first time here,” Jalloh said at the Legislative Building. “We have been here before. We have asked for help. We’ve met with the Minister of Health (and) the Minister of Rural Health. We have explained our situation to them. We constantly keep talking to the SHA but we have the feeling that our concerns are falling on deaf ears.”

There are only four CT technicians working at the Pasqua and in the next month, two of them are going on maternity leave.

Jalloh said the entire staffing situation is awful.

“(It’s) terrible, all of it, I’m telling you, all of it,” he said.

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The main problems he pointed out were recruitment, retention and wages.

“If you open the door for people to come in, you recruit people to the province and you don’t do anything to retain them, you’re just opening the door to come and they’ll open the back door to leave,” Jalloh said.

He wants people trained in the province to stay here. He said higher wages could encourage that.

“We want people to stay in Saskatchewan. So anything that can be done to increase those compensation for people to stay here, it would be a good thing for all of us,” he said.

Jalloh explains there is a wage gap that sends health-care workers to neighbouring provinces.

He said an X-ray technician’s maximum hourly pay is $39.22 in Saskatchewan. A similar position in Manitoba maxes out at $46.34.

Love said the government needs to sit down and really listen to health-care workers.

“We need to make sure that we have a situation where we are a place where health-care workers want to be,” Love said. “Currently, that’s not the system that these workers have described as we hear about 88 per cent of Saskatchewan-trained technologists leaving.”

He acknowledges that better pay is only part of the solution and much more needs to be done.

“We hear from health-care workers that they want to have work-life balance,” he said.

“They want to be able to take time off. We need a situation where health-care workers want to work in Saskatchewan because they’re respected, and respect starts with listening to them. That’s what’s missing today.”