Province provides update, reports progress on Sask. health-care recruitment

Strengthening health care continues to be a priority in the province, according to Minister of Health Jeremy Cockrill.

That, despite the statistic that about one in six people in Saskatchewan still do not have a family doctor.

On Tuesday at the Saskatchewan Healthcare Recruitment Agency in Saskatoon, Cockrill provided an update on health-care recruitment in the province.

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Since 2022 – when the Health Human Resources Action Plan was launched – the Government of Saskatchewan is reporting more than 7,500 nurses, doctors and other health-care professionals have joined the workforce in Saskatchewan.

Included in that number, more than 3,000 nurses – including nurse practitioners – and 742 physicians have been recruited to Saskatchewan’s health-care system since 2022. Of the more than 700 doctors, 369 recruits have been family physicians and 373 specialists are among the recruits.

650 CKOM has asked the Ministry of Health how many health-care employees have left the province in the same period of time, but did not receive a response before the time of publication.

Cockrill said these numbers mean confidence for residents and progress towards reducing wait times in the province.

“The rural and remote recruitment incentive has helped to fill more than 560 hard-to-recruit, full-time positions in our province, and retention also remains a key priority for our government,” he said.

The Health Minister noted the Saskatchewan Health Authority has welcomed 425 internationally-educated health professionals from the Philippines.

More than 1,000 new training seats have also been added to 34 different health-care programs in Saskatchewan, as well as 20 new seats for medical students and 10 new medical residency positions in the province. Both training and residency spots have been fully filled, Cockrill reported on Tuesday.

Pointing to residency positions in Swift Current being filled, Cockrill highlighted the benefit of recruiting students within Saskatchewan who want to stay in the province once they’ve finished their medical training.

“I want to know that there’s students from the northwest of this province in every incoming cohort at the College of Medicine, because at the end of the day, I want students who grew up in the community where I call home to have that opportunity to go to the College of Medicine and then go through a residency program and hopefully come back to my hometown and be able to practice,” he said.

Cockrill added that the province is staying in touch with students from the province who leave to study elsewhere in the country or the world.

“We want to make sure that we stay in contact with them, that we are, you know, in their face, talking about the opportunities that we have in this province, so that when they’re done their training, we have an opportunity for residency and licensure in this province, and that’s so crucial.”

Part of the province’s 2022 plan to improve health care recruitment included the creation of the Saskatchewan Healthcare Recruitment Agency, Cockrill noted, “dedicated to recruiting doctors, nurses and other priority health care professionals from within Saskatchewan, across Canada, across North America, as well as overseas.”

Every year, Saskatchewan adds doctors to its ranks, Cockrill said. However, the province’s population is also growing.

Saskatchewan Healthcare Recruitment Agency (SHRA) CEO, Terri Strunk, speaks at the agency’s Saskatoon office on July 28, 2026. (Libby Gray/650 CKOM)

Dr. Brian Stout recently relocated from Florida to practice emergency pediatric medicine in Saskatoon at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital. He’s one of the province’s recent U.S. recruits.

Stout said he saw a recruitment ad from the SHRA on the website Doximity, which he described as “Facebook for doctors.” Wanting a change of pace, he said he and his wife decided to make the move to Canada.

He said the transition and immigration process was fairly smooth. He began practicing in April this year and his family joined him after moving in June.

One of the most significant differences Stout has noticed between his prior U.S. practice and his work in Saskatoon is a much higher level of addiction in some of his pediatric patients.

“We would get teenagers or such experimenting with, you know, drugs, alcohol, that type of thing. But the level of addiction I’m seeing here seems to be much, much different,” he shared.

In a “very competitive” global market, Cockrill said the work of the SHRA is “even more important.”

“Through this collaboration, we are putting patients first and ensuring the right care is available at the right time, as close to home as possible,” Cockrill said. “Recruitment continues to be strong across this province.”

Sharing a bit about how the SHRA focuses those recruitment efforts, CEO Terri Strunk said the organization is “very, very targeted” when it comes to spending resources.

“Doximity is a great platform in the U.S., so we ran some ads. We know we have a shortage, a big gap of family medicine doctors, emergency doctors, anesthesiology. So we ran some ads that way,” she explained.

Strunk said the organization will work with physicians like Stout, checking credentials, assisting with the licensure process, until the doctor receives a job offer.

The U.S., United Kingdom and Ireland are among places where Saskatchewan has focused international recruitment. Going forward, Cockrill indicated that the UK and Ireland will be where Saskatchewan focuses its recruitment efforts.

Though Dr. Mark Fenton was born and raised in Saskatchewan, his journey to train to become a specialist in lung transplantation took him out of the province.

“I made a very deliberate decision to return to Saskatchewan and practice medicine here and that has given me an enormous reward,” Fenton said. “I’ve had a very diverse and rewarding career in both clinical and academic medicine, and now in physician leadership.

“I’m really grateful for the things that Saskatchewan has given me.”

He said Saskatchewan has tens of thousands of health-care workers spread across the province, each one caring and supporting patients daily and each one with a “story about why they do that here.”

Fenton said everyone working in the province’s health-care system has chosen Saskatchewan to be the place they do the work they do.

On Tuesday, the Saskatchewan NDP also spoke on health care in the province, with health critic Meara Conway stating that workers in the province are “burning out and going on sick and stress leave” and patients are “being forced to go out of province and pay tens of thousands of dollars out of their own pocket to get surgeries to ease their pain.”

“Healthcare in Saskatchewan has never been in such awful shape. We bring forward stories every day of people suffering in hospital hallways that are described by workers as war zones,” Conway said in a release from the official Opposition.