Wait times for elective surgeries expected to rise in the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region

The budget for the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region isn’t as bad as it could have been, but health care will still be affected.

“In places where there are elective procedures that we don’t have the funding to address, we’ll probably see wait times grow some,” Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region CEO Keith Dewar said.

The health region is trying to use attrition to move staff around, Dewar added.

The attrition rate is about eight per cent, which means about 800 people leave a year, he said.

“We again are going to try to make those changes as much as possible without layoffs. If there are layoffs it will hopefully occur that they would get opportunities across the organization,” he said.

“More money would be useful. However, we also recognize we can do better with the resources we have.”

The Saskatchewan Union of Nurses is concerned the budget isn’t keeping up with demand. It says patients are already being put at risk because of short staffing.

“Whether it’s a layoff, whether it’s by attrition, if there’s a vacancy there, it already means there isn’t someone filling that position that isn’t caring for those patients,” Saskatchewan Union of Nurses vice president Denise Dyck said.

“We already know that there’s a lot of budget pressures on the system, but we already know that there aren’t enough frontline registered nurses in the system to deal with patients. They are so much more acute than they used to be, so those pressures are there.”

Increasing wait lists for elective surgeries will also be a frustration for patients, Dyck said.

“Lots of elective procedures are for having things like hips and knees done,” she said. “There’s a number of surgeries that are done not because the patient is acute and requires that surgery to actually survive. It really depends on what a patient’s condition is, whether something is elective or not.”

The budget for the health region is just over one billion dollars, but it could change. The provincial government is still demanding a three and a half per cent cost savings that hasn’t been included yet as it’s still being negotiated.

“When it is implemented, there will be a reduction in revenue, but also a reduction in expenses,” Dewar said. “It will change revenue by 3.5 and expenditures by 3.5 theoretically. Whether it’s as clean as that, we don’t know yet.”

The switchover to a single health care authority is adding to uncertainty, Dewar said.

“How do you connect people across the province into one organization both on the corporate side, the people that support the financial activity, parole processing, all those types of activities, to the clinical work that we do?” Dewar said.

“But I think people are also excited about the opportunity that it presents, and that’s the way I look at it too.”

Dewar also announced during the press conference Thursday morning that he will not apply to be CEO of the single health authority. He made his decision for personal reasons and will finish his five year contract at the end of October.