Saskatchewan will be moving to a single health care authority from the 12 current regions the Saskatchewan government announced on Jan. 4.
The Saskatchewan Advisory Panel on Health System Structure has been meeting since August 2016 and Health Minister Jim Reiter announced that the government will be accepting all four recommendations that came from the panel.
Greg Ottenbreit, Minister of Rural and Remote Health, says they were cautious when they heard the recommendation to go to a single authority but they are now one of the last provinces to do a major restructuring.
Most people think of Alberta when it comes to a single authority but Ottenbreit says that they are going to learn from the mistakes of Alberta who was the first to do a large amalgamation.
“(Alberta) did it virtually overnight and they realized a lot of issues without a lot of pre-planning.”
The panel’s recommendations come from 30 different meetings with significant players in Saskatchewan health care from unions to boards to ambulance providers and professional organizations.
A common theme of these meetings was the regional boundaries getting in the way of providing quality care to Saskatchewan, says Ottenbreit, and all providers wanted to get to a better level of service without cutting care to rural areas.
One thing was clear when accepting these recommendations, says Ottenbreit, and that was there would be not closures of facilities.
As the President and Chief Executive Officer of Saskatoon Health Region, Dan Florizone says this is not about dividing the province into rural and urban areas of care but providing care to all of Saskatchewan.
“Many of the problems that appear in hospital with over capacity, their root cause is based on our inability to provide those community based supports that are necessary and that’s throughout urban and rural.”
Ottenbreit says that local advisory groups will be the voice of rural care and will be able to discuss service options with the governing Authority.
“There was no argument that we had to go away from the recommendation of one region with strong area representations for those different bodies.”
Ottenbreit believes they will see great improvements with the high level administration that they will have the new authority thinking and acting as one as well as alleviating some of those administration costs and IT costs that come with running 12 different health regions.
Preliminary numbers put the savings to upwards of $10-20 million, says Ottenbreit, but there are sure to be more inefficiencies that may be found as the authority is created.
Ottenbreit says that the new board will also provide greater access to pilot projects to communities outside of Saskatoon and Regina.
Taking these successes and making them accessible province wide will be easier without these regional boundaries, says Ottenbreit.
The new authority is expected to be implemented come 2017 but Ottenbreit says there is still plenty that needs to be done and they are going to take their time.
