YORKTON - CUPE and its flags were set up in City Central Park to raise awareness about the Yorkton Regional Hospital's temporarily losing microbiology services.
Linda Renkas, the general vice-president for region five for CUPE 5430, said she felt it was important for the public to understand what was going on.
"We want to raise awareness to the public about what is happening to the healthcare services that need to be provided for them," she said. "We've seen rural health care services being eroded over the years, with the latest being the movement of microbiology testing to Regina. Microbiology testing diagnoses, very specific infections that can occur that need a quick turnaround time to know what to treat it with. We've been told those services have been moved temporarily, but we are not given a date that they are coming, so we are concerned about that."
Judy Henley, the president of CUPE Saskatchewan, said that she has seen this story play out before.
"We used to have a laundry service, and that got closed down, and they privatized it and hired a contractor from Alberta and moved it to Regina so now with the laundry services, they are transporting laundry across this province rather than having laundries that used to be in the regional areas," she stated. "Pediatrics is another one. We've lost the beds here, and throughout the years, we've lost a lot of services. If you want the service, you have to out go out to Regina to Saskatoon."
"When you lose a service here, like the labs or mental health, or pediatrics, there are a lot of people that don't have vehicles to transport their children, we don't have a bus service anymore, and healthcare is a human right, it's a problem."
President of CUPE 5430, Sandra Seitz said that not having certain services can deter healthcare workers from working in rural areas.
"It's very frustrating when there is the availability of employees to be to able to work and provide that services, and when you take a part of somebody's job away, there are not working to their full scope. How are you going to recruit and retain when they are not provided with the opportunity to work, and this is a problem across Saskatchewan that we are very concerned about for rural residents," she said. "We should be provided with the same service in a timely fashion that any other resident in Saskatchewan, and the more that we see jobs disappear from rural Saskatchewan, the more that's going to affect our communities. that's going to affect our volunteerism, our wages build communities, and we are that disappearing also."
Everett Hindley, the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Seniors and Rural and Remote Health, said via a letter that he reassures the future of lab services in Yorkton is due to a temporary shortage of Medical Laboratory Technologists and Medical Laboratory Assistants that is impacting our microbiology processing in Yorkton - a sub-segment of the overall Lab Services conducted at Yorkton Regional Hospital.
