Alec Salloum
Regina Leader-Post
Gerri Grant left her interventional radiology technologist job of 17 years after witnessing how short staffing affected patient care and the well-being of her colleagues.
“I couldn’t handle it anymore,” said Grant from the Saskatchewan Legislative Building this week.
Leaving made her wrestle with the fact that by exiting the department, her colleagues would be in a worse position because there would be even fewer people on staff. Since she resigned in the summer of 2024, she’s heard things have only got worse.
“I gave up a really fabulous, engaging career,” she said. “Watching my co-workers struggle, myself struggle with that work-life balance we were taking on-call hours at an excessive rate … watching patients suffer — I couldn’t see that anymore.”
This week, the Saskatchewan NDP published a letter from Grant and 14 other health-care workers from the Regina General Hospital concerning conditions in the interventional radiology department. The letter describes how workers “are experiencing overwhelming challenges due to chronic understaffing, poor communication, and increasing operational efficiencies.”
In addition to staffing concerns within the unit, the letter says the culmination of these issues “have become both direct patient and staff safety concerns” as workers describe how a lack of adequate physician coverage “has already resulted in cases where patients did not receive life-saving interventions in time.”
Grant said she could not speak to the specifics of such occurrences, but said any time there is a delay in critical medicine, “you’re going to have negative patient outcomes.”
On Thursday, Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said the government has already signed contracts with private radiology groups based out of Regina that should “help stabilize radiology services.”
Cockrill said while he had only recently seen the letter in question, there was an awareness of issues within the department, which led to the contracts.
“Once these teams are set up in the hospitals, I expect that patients will see better access to care,” he said, though there was no word on when services would see the impact of said agreements.
As for efforts made to address health-care staffing issues through the Health Human Resources (HHR) Action Plan, Grant, who still works in health care, said “I don’t even know what that is.”
According to the government, the action plan works to “recruit, train, incentivize and retain health care workers to strengthen our provincial health care workforce.”
The letter, which was leaked to the Opposition, first came across CUPE 5430 President Bashir Jalloh‘s desk in mid-April but the issues were flagged even before that when the union did a survey of technologists.
Bashir Jalloh, President of Cupe Local 5430, inside his office on Monday, March 14, 2022 in Regina.
“Eighty-eight per cent of respondents said that their workload has increased significantly over the past five years with staff shortages being a major problem,” said Jalloh in an interview Friday.
“Over 90 per cent of them say the workload has significantly impacted patient quality and patient safety.”
Jalloh said he’s appreciative that the health minister will sit down and listen to concerns but action is needed. Within the letter, there are nine action items relating to recruitment, retention, shortages and more that he would like to see the government move on.
“Are they putting anything in motion? We don’t know,” said Jalloh.
The union represents approximately 13,600 workers spanning several classifications and jobs within the health-care field. Dionne Wagner, an area representative for CUPE, said the current status of health care in Saskatchewan, and compounding issues of pay, staffing, treatment of employees and communication, is sending workers to other provinces for opportunities.
“We just can’t seem to keep them in Saskatchewan,” said Wagner, adding that with many workers taking on 36-hour shifts, it’s no wonder.
“People are completely burnt out.”
alsalloum@postmedia.com
