Saskatchewan Considering Privatizing Some Surgeries | The Canadian News

REGINA – The Saskatchewan government is considering bringing back a program that would privatize some surgeries to address a growing backlog of people in need of surgery.

There are 35,000 people in the province awaiting surgery, a list that continues to grow as COVID-19 continues to overwhelm the health care system.

In 2010, the Saskatchewan Party government introduced an initiative to help reduce surgical wait times when the list was 27,500.

People on the waiting list were allowed to choose a public or private provider for selected surgeries. The goal was that no patient waited more than three months.

The initiative’s final report said the four-year program helped 11,528 patients get off the waiting list within the three-month period.

“That would be one of the options we would consider to address some of the current challenges we have,” Prime Minister Scott Moe said Thursday.

Those challenges include a shortage of healthcare workers.

Moe said the government is also exploring ways to expand surgical capacity in the public sector to make it sustainable in the long term.

In recent months, the province privatized some testing and contact tracing to allow healthcare workers who were reassigned to deal with COVID-19 to return to their original jobs.

Other than some surgeries, there are no plans to privatize other parts of public healthcare, Moe said.

NDP opposition leader Ryan Meili said he is deeply concerned that Moe is using the pandemic to “try to take advantage of a crisis to further privatize our system.”

“All the smart options should be on the table. Stupid options shouldn’t. Ineffective options shouldn’t do it, ”Meili said.

“We know that when private, for-profit, user-paid surgery is introduced, waiting times are increased in the public system.”

Dallas Oberik, 70, visited the Saskatchewan legislature on Thursday as a guest of the opposition, but also spoke with the prime minister to discuss his three-year wait for hip surgery.

“This started before the pandemic, but when the virus hit, we all went to hell in one basket,” said Oberik, who blamed government policy.

“We are here because we didn’t step up and we didn’t do what needed to be done, and we didn’t listen to medical professionals.”

Earlier this week Scott Livingstone, head of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, said it could take 18 months to catch up on hip and knee surgeries alone, not including anyone newly added to the waiting list.

“It is going to be worse and I will live with it simply because I have no other choice. If I was wealthy independently, I would go to a private clinic and they would take care of this right away, ”said Oberik.

“I don’t have that much money, so I’ll be like everyone else, wait my turn and do what I can to get through each day.”

This Canadian Press report was first published on November 4, 2021.