Opinion by Peter Friedrichsen • Yesterday
Ambulances are parked outside Regina General Hospital on Thursday, January 27, 2022 in Regina. KAYLE NEIS / Regina Leader-Post
A few days ago I heard on the radio that a four-year-old girl in Regina suffering from a brain tumour could not get a hospital bed for over 20 hours.
How is it that a hospital — in the capital city — isn’t able to accommodate a little girl in the fight of her life?
The stark reality is: Doctors, nurses and patients young and old have all been telling our provincial government that our health-care system is collapsing. Yet our government fails to acknowledge that our hospitals, clinics, labs — and all of the people working in them — have been sending SOS signals for months, if not years.
I see our public health system as if it’s the Titanic and Saskatchewan people are the passengers. Our state-of-the-art universal health-care system was built 60 years ago. But lately we’ve been dodging icebergs and now we’re on a collision course.
Last year, we ran out of ventilators and taxpayers paid for 22 people to get care in Ontario. This spring, an ICU doctor left the province and this fall a nurse was burnt out after only eight months of work.
And now, they still refuse to use public resource revenue windfalls or federal COVID-19 funding and acquiesce to the Liberal-NDP “costly coalition” as hospitals swell, families cannot find doctors or children’s medication and we plunge into flu season.
We must remember that the Titanic didn’t simply break in two. It was the captain’s and crew’s decisions that led it to sink. We must recognize the problem isn’t the system, but the decisions being made by those who are in charge of it.
The Saskatchewan Party government needs to immediately fund and restore our public health-care system — which includes shelters and harm reduction facilities. Our compromised health-care system can no longer respond to emergencies such as the Humboldt Broncos crash or the massacre at James Smith Cree Nation.
We’re taking on water and people have already perished. Just like the boiler men and third-class passengers of Titanic; those working on the front lines and most vulnerable are at the highest risk. Now the water has risen and even folks like me with good health and decent jobs are feeling stranded.
We cannot continue on a course toward outsourcing the public services and institutions we rely on for our safety and well-being.
In the past decade the province privatized MRI services, yet last year patients were expected to travel out of province to pay to get the procedure done. This move did not improve care; rather, it put an extra burden on Saskatchewan people.
A private health-care system boasts false security, like the watertight compartments that inevitably fail with a large enough hole. A private health-care system only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the disadvantaged and oppressed.
A private health-care system is the first-class passengers watching the flares like they’re fireworks on the first lifeboats out. People here are sinking — and literally freezing to death — and our elected leaders running our province fail to notice.
They fail to recognize that we have collided with an iceberg and all the rest of us can hear is mayday.
I dread that more four-year-old kids are left without a warm safe bed in a hospital, or that homeless folks are dying alone in the cold. I’m bewildered that the doctors, nurses and other medical workers are rendered a “heroic” band, drowning as they continue working through burnout.
The minister of health is not the noble captain who knows his grave fault and stays with the boat, but the selfishly unapologetic first mate who said we had to change our course — into the iceberg dead ahead. Bundle up and find your lifejackets, Saskatchewan. I hope there are enough lifeboats.
Peter Friedrichsen is a non-profit manager in Prince Albert with a background in economics and community development, particularly with Indigenous communities in north-central Saskatchewan.
Related
Murray Mandryk: Collapse of payroll system latest big health problem
Ambulances are parked outside Regina General Hospital on Thursday, January 27, 2022 in Regina. KAYLE NEIS / Regina Leader-Post
A few days ago I heard on the radio that a four-year-old girl in Regina suffering from a brain tumour could not get a hospital bed for over 20 hours.
How is it that a hospital — in the capital city — isn’t able to accommodate a little girl in the fight of her life?
The stark reality is: Doctors, nurses and patients young and old have all been telling our provincial government that our health-care system is collapsing. Yet our government fails to acknowledge that our hospitals, clinics, labs — and all of the people working in them — have been sending SOS signals for months, if not years.
I see our public health system as if it’s the Titanic and Saskatchewan people are the passengers. Our state-of-the-art universal health-care system was built 60 years ago. But lately we’ve been dodging icebergs and now we’re on a collision course.
Last year, we ran out of ventilators and taxpayers paid for 22 people to get care in Ontario. This spring, an ICU doctor left the province and this fall a nurse was burnt out after only eight months of work.
And now, they still refuse to use public resource revenue windfalls or federal COVID-19 funding and acquiesce to the Liberal-NDP “costly coalition” as hospitals swell, families cannot find doctors or children’s medication and we plunge into flu season.
We must remember that the Titanic didn’t simply break in two. It was the captain’s and crew’s decisions that led it to sink. We must recognize the problem isn’t the system, but the decisions being made by those who are in charge of it.
The Saskatchewan Party government needs to immediately fund and restore our public health-care system — which includes shelters and harm reduction facilities. Our compromised health-care system can no longer respond to emergencies such as the Humboldt Broncos crash or the massacre at James Smith Cree Nation.
We’re taking on water and people have already perished. Just like the boiler men and third-class passengers of Titanic; those working on the front lines and most vulnerable are at the highest risk. Now the water has risen and even folks like me with good health and decent jobs are feeling stranded.
We cannot continue on a course toward outsourcing the public services and institutions we rely on for our safety and well-being.
In the past decade the province privatized MRI services, yet last year patients were expected to travel out of province to pay to get the procedure done. This move did not improve care; rather, it put an extra burden on Saskatchewan people.
A private health-care system boasts false security, like the watertight compartments that inevitably fail with a large enough hole. A private health-care system only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the disadvantaged and oppressed.
A private health-care system is the first-class passengers watching the flares like they’re fireworks on the first lifeboats out. People here are sinking — and literally freezing to death — and our elected leaders running our province fail to notice.
They fail to recognize that we have collided with an iceberg and all the rest of us can hear is mayday.
I dread that more four-year-old kids are left without a warm safe bed in a hospital, or that homeless folks are dying alone in the cold. I’m bewildered that the doctors, nurses and other medical workers are rendered a “heroic” band, drowning as they continue working through burnout.
The minister of health is not the noble captain who knows his grave fault and stays with the boat, but the selfishly unapologetic first mate who said we had to change our course — into the iceberg dead ahead. Bundle up and find your lifejackets, Saskatchewan. I hope there are enough lifeboats.
Peter Friedrichsen is a non-profit manager in Prince Albert with a background in economics and community development, particularly with Indigenous communities in north-central Saskatchewan.
Related
Murray Mandryk: Collapse of payroll system latest big health problem
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