Sun Country Health Region’s president and CEO Marga Cugnet toured the long-term care facilities in southeast Saskatchewan recently, picking up information from the residents and staff as to how to improve their care and lifestyles.
Cugnet told the board of directors at their Dec. 1 meeting in Weyburn that she found the nursing care in the centres to be “good and the facilities were clean and there was a strong home-like feeling in most of the centres.”
As expected, a good deal of the time was spent discussing meals and menus, with the residents expressing a continuous desire for basic meals such as “good old meat and potatoes with a few fish dishes, on occasion.”
She reported there was a move toward providing more physiotherapy sessions and an improvement in the activities calendars on weekends which can move along rather slowly when no entertainment is planned and the only break from the standard routines are the church services. Cugnet said up to four hours of alternative activities are now being planned in several locations to help alleviate that situation.
The CEO also provided informational updates on laboratory and imaging services during her presentation to the board. Lab services are provided in 15 facilities in the health region that caters to a total population of nearly 60,000 residents in southeast Saskatchewan.
“We have over 60 personnel with 18 medical laboratory technologists, 29 combined laboratory and X-ray technologists and 12 medical lab assistants,” she said. There are also three laboratory services workers.
About 72 per cent of the $5.4 million budget for lab services is gobbled up by salaries, while 17 per cent goes to acquiring supplies and six per cent for instrument service contracts.
“The labs are where the tests are done on clinical specimens and samples to get information about the health of a patient, pertaining to diagnosis, treatment and disease prevention,” she said. The service includes material testing, tissues or body fluids obtained from a patient or clinical studies to determine the cause and nature of disease.
Over 100,000 samples are collected and analyzed throughout the region annually and over 460,000 tests have been carried out in the past 10 months.
The medical imaging services, which include X-rays and ultrasounds, are found in 12 facilities in one form or another and there is the soon-to-be included CT scans at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Estevan only. Ultrasounds are only available in Weyburn and Estevan.
There are 35 employees in the imaging departments across the health region with 25 of them providing a combination of laboratory services as well as imaging technology. There are another three employed as clerical support staffers.
The ultrasound image readings and diagnostics are contracted out to Radiology Associates in Regina, said Cugnet.
The imaging sector in the local health region will see over 22,000 clients in the course of a year and they will take more than 27,000 X-rays and 2,200 ultrasound exams per year.
The operating budget for the imaging section is $3.3 million per year with 64 per cent taken up by salaries and 26 per cent remuneration for services rendered by others. Another eight per cent is spent on equipment.
