A province-wide public opinion survey commissioned by the Health Sciences Association of Saskatchewan shows Saskatchewan residents are concerned that the under-staffing of specialized health care professionals endangers their access to needed health care services.
The information was released by the Health Sciences Association of Saskatchewan president Karen Wasylenko during a news conference in Regina.
“Respondents to our provincial survey identified access to health care services (21.3 per cent) and waiting lists for health care services (18.9 per cent) as the two most important issues facing Saskatchewan health care today,” Wasylenko said.
“At the same time, eight in ten respondents (80.1 per cent) agreed with the statement that Saskatchewan health care employers have chosen to under-staff specialized health care professionals in order to control their budgets.
“In short, the public is concerned that professional under-staffing in health care is hurting their ability to access health care services, when and where they need them,” Wasylenko said.
“The impact of professional under-staffing on access to health care services was confirmed by another series of questions on the survey. Fifty-five per cent of respondents said in the past 12 months they, or a member of their immediate family, had required the services of a health sciences professional from the public health care system. Nearly one-quarter of these respondents (23.3 per cent) said they waited from one to six months to access the health care services they required; while another 6.1 per cent reported they had to wait six to 12 months for these health care services,” Wasylenko added.
“Evan after they accessed those services, 14.5 per cent of the responders reported they were unable to receive enough treatment at the appropriate frequency to solve their health care problem,” she said. The telephone survey had 1,043 Saskatchewan resident respondents. It was conducted between Aug. 11 and 31. The survey provided a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent to a 95 per cent confidence level. The survey was conducted by Points West Consulting of Regina.
