The Christmas Day meal for the Regina Pioneer Village resident consisted of prepared two cold cut slices including bologna, soggy macaroni salad, an apricot, milk and a roll.
And since it was first posted on social media, there have been equal parts justification and apology from both the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region (RQHR) and the Saskatchewan Party government .
In fairness, the haunting image of the extremely meagre supper taken by a family relative was a second offering after an early Christmas dinner that did include turkey and mash potatoes.
All of us have, at one time or the other, opted for such less nutritious supper. Or at least that would certainly seem the case for any number of Sask. Party supporters who — upon seeing images of the meal — now profess their love of bologna. One wonders how many of them ate bologna on Christmas Day.
There again, the way that this image has been flashed around the Internet by the NDP Opposition and their supporters, one would think this is the daily reality in Saskatchewan care homes by decree of the government.
But whether in the right context or not, there is something about the image of that meal — fed to a resident of an old folks’ home on Christmas Day — that spells big political problems for Premier Brad Wall’s government in 2015.
In fact, it begs some serious questions:
First, given that we’ve just shelled out $40-million (which doesn’t include the millions spent on lost work days for training) to a U.S. consultant to tell us what’s wrong with our health care system, wouldn’t such problems be addressed?
Health Minister Dustin Duncan announced in the dwindling days of 2014 that his government was cancelling its contract with health efficiency expert John Black and Associates (JBA) three months early, saving $3 million.
The government downplayed the early cancellation as nothing more than the reality that JBA has now trained enough locally trained “lean” efficiency experts that its services are no longer needed.
But the end of the JBA contract doesn’t end the debate over its value and the Christmas supper at Pioneer Village is a glaring reminder.
Second, shouldn’t a health efficiency expert have addressed this? Surely, a $40-million consultant would recognize there is something very wrong with feeding seniors a low-fibre, high fat, high salt, high cholesterol meals that, in the end, likely ads to the costs of the health system.
Well, the problem is that JBA not only did have any capacity to offer such expertise but such expertise was in no way part of JBA’s mandate. The problem with JBA is that its expertise is confined to the delivery of acute care hospitals … or better put, U.S. for-profit hospitals that are stand-alone entities.
That the government chose to hire an efficiency expert with no particular understanding of the integrated nature of Canadian health care delivery that includes nursing home patients — who may wind up in hospitals if issues like diet and care are not taken seriously — has been a huge problem.
This takes us to the third question: Is “lean” only going to be about saving cost savings at the expense of patients and the seniors?
The Wall government has already made it crystal clear to all of us that 2015 will be a year of serious belt-tightening with oil at slightly more than half its value of nine months ago.
However, Wall is framing the belt-tightening as “non-essential” government travel and hiring.
That surely does not mean feeding seniors cheap cold cuts on Christmas Day. But every time such news breaks, people are going to be asking about the $40 million spent on “lean” efficiency.
They might even spend a lot of time in 2015 wondering about all the money frittered away in the previous good seven years.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
