NORTHEAST — The province is changing the structure of the organization that recruits doctors.
The Physician Recruitment Agency of Saskatchewan, known as SaskDocs, will cease to be a separate organization and will be absorbed into the Saskatchewan Health Authority at the end of August.
Greg Ottenbreit, the rural health minister, said SaskDocs’ work will still be done from the same building and will still have a special budget. The staff should stay the same but they’ll become employees of the health authority.
“It shouldn’t change it very much at all,” he said.
Brad Hvidston, Tisdale’s town administrator, said he’s hoping the change will improve the town’s efforts to recruit new doctors. The town has a local doctor recruitment committee.
“We’ve been lobbying the government for changes to help in that regard, so it’s good to see something moving forward,” he said. “How the details play out, I guess we’ll see.”
Rick Lang, Melfort’s mayor, said he doesn’t think the province’s change will have much of an effect on his city’s doctor recruitment efforts.
“Quite often what happens is the doctors in the community are very involved in further recruitment, so often, they’re making contact with candidates and a lot of recruitment for needed positions are done directly/indirectly by the doctors on staff.”
Unlike most of the Northeast, doctors in Melfort are paid via a fee-for-service model as opposed to a salary, which means the local physician group has a say in how many doctors are recruited to ensure that there’s enough demand for their services to sustain their practices.
Ottenbreit said the province is making the change because it was a recommendation in the report that suggested the province merge its health regions into a single health authority. When the province created SaskDocs in 2011, there were 12 different health regions it could serve. Now, it only has one client – the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
“It made more sense, as was the recommendation of the panel report, to roll that underneath the health authority to serve that one client that it has now, which is the health authority.”
The rural health minister said the changes will help with doctor recruitment – as well as recruitment of nurses and other medical professionals – because there is a Saskatchewan-wide view, not just local.
“The one health authority, they look on a province-wide level to see where the gaps are with services being delivered and where patients are having difficulty accessing services and then they’ll allocate those resources as they see fit.”
Ottenbreit said he expects the work done by SaskDocs to continue. He said the number of doctors in the province has increased by 900 within a decade, that training seats for doctors has increased from 60 to 100, that 75 per cent of those doctors trained in the province stay, compared to around 55 to 60 per cent before.
The minister said there’s been a lot of work that’s been done to expose student doctors to rural Saskatchewan to show them the kinds of job opportunities available to them.
“There’s more work we need to do to expose some of those physicians to those opportunities but we are seeing some of those numbers getting better, although some communities still are finding a bit of a challenge recruiting some of those positions to their communities.”
