Perhaps the first place new Rural and Remote Health Minister Greg Ottenbreit should examine is the hospital in his own home town of Yorkton.
At least a couple dozen elective surgeries in this critical rural health centre were cancelled late last month because of a bug problem.
"At the last minute they cancelled the surgery stating that there were insects and little flies in the operating room," Jason Butler told CBC News. "It didn't leave a good feeling with me and in fact I'm requesting to go to Regina now for surgery."
A Sunrise Health Region spokesman confirmed the problem as cracks in the caulking of a window, allowing tiny insects to crawl in for tiny pests to get in.
Some may see this as a minor hiccup in rural health care delivery - one that is easily rectified. Unless you are someone like Butler who booked a month off work in anticipation of his surgery, you might see this as problem like this as hardly worth mentioning.
But it does seem rather indicative of the health delivery problem in aging rural facilities - a problem that may be compounded in the coming years as government's health priorities head off in other directions.
It is here where Ottenbreit, Health Minister Dustin Duncan and all members of the largely rural Saskatchewan Party government caucus may need to take a serious look at their priorities.
In no small irony, the very day that surgeries in Yorkton were being postponed because of the rundown nature of the facility, Premier Brad Wall and Duncan were turning over the shovel for the new Children's Hospital in Saskatoon that his being built right beside the Royal University Hospital.
Admittedly, criticizing the Children's Hospital isn't a popular thing - especially in either the cities or in Sask. Party ranks where there has been massive fund-raising and a massive buy-in that this is something the province desperately needs.
The thing is, though, it's questionable whether another Children's Hospital is needed in Western Canada and even more debateable as to whether this should be the priority for scarce health dollars.
While Wall and the Sask. Party have been selling the notion since opposition days that we are one of the few provinces in the country without our very own children's hospital, lost in the conversation has been whether than has meant our children our underserved.
There is no question that there needs to be upgrades in both the maternity and pediatrics facilities at RUH, but did we ever need a separate, special facility of our own?
Besides the serious question of whether we have the volume of severely sick kids requiring such specialized attention, there is the very legitimate problem of simply attracting qualified pediatric specialists to staff it. In doing so, we will have to compete with the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver, the Children's Hospital of Winnipeg and even the Sick Kids in Toronto.
And without the best specialists, parents will still make the difficult decision of going out of province to where the best doctors are. For some of the very specialized work, they will have no choice because the kind of talent we are talking about may very well be limited to but a few doctors in the entire country.
Then there is the question of how much we will have to pay for this talent and a fourth hospital in Saskatoon that already sees its newest City Hospital highly underutilized.
Meanwhile, smaller rural Saskatchewan cities like Yorkton and every other town in the province will have to fight that much harder for their share of the scarce health dollars.
It's something that Ottenbreit and the entire Sask. Party government needs to seriously thing about.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
