Mental Health Awareness Week wrapped up recently, and ironically, on the tail of the many activities organized in this community, comes a visit to North Battleford city council by Prairie North Health Region CEO David Fan to seek support for a new Saskatchewan Hospital.
Sask. Hospital, and the plight of the patients living there, received a lot of press earlier this year, thanks to MLA Len Taylor, who showcased the situation in the Saskatchewan Legislature. Taylor has been a champion of replacing the 100-year-old facility since his days as health minister in Lorne Calvert's NDP government.
Prairie North Health Region, Taylor, health care workers, families and others have lobbied tirelessly on behalf of patients at Sask. Hospital, who, according to Fan, live in conditions "you and I would never accept."
Fan's latest bid to drum up municipal support was met with open arms by city council, but this project seems doomed to a treadmill cycle of study, report, study and report.
The cycle began in 2006, with a study that was completed in 2008. That original design has been in limbo for three years, and has since been replaced with a new proposal. The latest design is the result of yet another study, but there is still no firm commitment to actual construction of a new facility.
Meanwhile, patients there are forced to share accommodations and bathroom facilities in a facility that has never undergone a significant upgrade in its century-long history. The situation could be described as barbaric, and one wonders if it is allowed to continue because of type of illness these patients suffer.
There's just nothing glamorous about mental illness. To mainstream society, mental illness remains at best mysterious, at worst frightening. In many cases, there is no cure, only management, which puts such illness on the same plain as diabetes and hypertension. Yet mental illness, in spite of the efforts of events such as Mental Health Awareness Week, just isn't regarded in the same light.
What will be truly tragic is if we see construction of the much lauded provincial children's hospital given the green light before the situation at Saskatchewan Hospital is addressed. Of course, Saskatchewan's children deserve the best possible care, but the patients at Saskatchewn Hospital have waited long enough.
