REGINA – After walking away from its goal of eliminating emergency room waits by 2017, the provincial government is out with a new target: 60 per cent reduction by 2019.
Health Minister Dustin Duncan made the announcement Wednesday, calling the updated aim “aggressive.”
“The intent of this is to signal that we’re still committed to seeing significant reductions in our emergency department waits,” Duncan said. “This is work we have to do.”
“We cant just dump more money into the ER and hope for a better outcome.”
A 2014-15 provincial health care planning document said the goal of admitting at least 85 per cent of emergency patients within five hours could not be done without significant improvements to the health care system.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the average ER wait at Regina’s two hospitals is three hours and 54 minutes, while patients at Saskatoon’s three hospitals spend two hours and 12 minutes in the waiting room.
There’s no additional funding to what’s already a $4.7-million initiative – so getting to a 60 per cent reduction in wait times there may not mean more doctors and nurses.
Instead, the push will be to improve drop-in clinics and home care to keep people from going to the hospital in the first place.
“We cant just dump more money into the emergency departments and hope for a better outcome,” Duncan said. “If you’re not actually addressing those factors before and after the typical emergency department experience, you’re just going to flood those additional resources.”
NDP health critic Danielle Chartier was critical of the new target, saying it’s a step back from Premier Brad Wall’s vow three years ago to have zero-waits.
“People already wait hours and ours in ERs and now we’re going to have to wait years and years for real progress on that,” Chartier said.
The trouble, she says, is people wait too long and eventually leave, choosing to either self-medicate or return later in even worse health.
Tom McIntosh, a health policy analyst at the University of Regina, says the problem of lengthy emergency room waits isn’t unique to Saskatchewan.
“Governments across the country have (said), ‘Oh look, they’re going down. We don’t need to pay much attention now because we’ve cracked that case.’ Then they turn away, and six months later they’re back up.”
Any plan to cut ER waits, McIntosh says, will only be successful if the effort is sustained.
Duncan suggested the new target would make Saskatchewan among the leaders in Canada for ER wait times.
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