“Not Far Enough”: Saskatchewan Health Unions Respond to New COVID-19 Measures | The Canadian News

Saskatchewan health care provider unions are welcoming efforts to ease the pressures of COVID-19 in emergency rooms and intensive care units, but are also calling for more to be done to relieve burned workers. .

“We need to have some breathing room in the system and that’s what will give us a slowdown,” said Saskatchewan Nurses Union President Tracy Zambory.

But the public health orders don’t go far enough. We needed to see mandatory masking go back into place. We needed to have more concrete action around vaccine passports. If we don’t do that and institute the public health measures that we had before, there will be no relief in the system. “

As part of a set of new pandemic measures announced Friday, the provincial government and the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) announced a reduction in elective or non-critical services to expand surge capacity amid rising COVID cases. -19.

“Temporary service outages will be localized and time-limited, as much as possible, while teams will mobilize to support the growing demands for COVID care and maintain critical services for non-COVID patients,” said the SHA in a statement Friday afternoon, adding that those affected will be notified directly.

SHA’s growth targets include increasing from a baseline of 79 beds to 130 beds to accommodate 80 COVID-19 infected ICU patients while maintaining care for an average of 50 non-COVID ICU patients.

The province and SHA are also currently in talks with health care provider unions to redeploy health workers.

The province said in a Friday morning press release that “if the SHA and the unions cannot reach an agreement before Monday, September 13, the Government of Saskatchewan is prepared to sign another Provincial Emergency Order to reactivate the previous provisions that allowed emergency labor mobility ”.

“It’s a strategy to try to reduce workloads and allocate them to the work that is most needed,” said SHA CEO Scott Livingstone.

“But at the end of the day it’s a challenge across this country and across North America what’s happening to healthcare workers on the front lines.”

The province also announced intentions to hire private contact trackers to further ease pressures on public health workers as cases mount.

However, the president of the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees Union, Tracey Sauer, echoed Zambory’s comments in a provided statement.

“” While I appreciate that the provincial government is finally taking some action, we don’t think they have gone far enough, “Sauer said.

“We would like to see you implement stronger measures to protect the health and safety of our members and the people of Saskatchewan. This includes dedicating significant provincial funds to hiring, training and retaining the workers needed to address chronic shortage issues in Saskatchewan’s health care system.

“If ever there was a time to act to address recruiting and retention issues, this is surely the time.”

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