A provincial health union and the agency representing its employers are again blaming each other for the collapse of contract talks.
The Health Sciences Association of Saskatchewan (HSAS) and the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations (SAHO) in dueling press releases blamed each other for the latest road block.
One of the issues both sides have struggled with this time around is new provincial rules barring a large percentage of health employees from going on strike. Instead they've been deemed essential.
Negotiating through the new rules has caused considerable delay in the latest round of health care negotiations.
The HSAS represents such employees as paramedics, hospital pharmacists, respiratory therapists, speech language pathologists, public health inspectors, psychologists and social workers.
Of the 2,948 Sunrise Health Region (SHR) employees, 165 belong to the HSAS.
In her release, president and chief executive officer Susan Antosh says SAHO is disappointed HSAS negotiators walked away from the bargaining table. That move caused the cancellation of continued talks scheduled for last Tuesday and Wednesday, Antosh says.
Antosh says HSAS walked away because SAHO refused to answer questions it believes are irrelevant.
In October, she says HSAS presented a list of questions related to staffing levels and wait lists for each classification.
Last week, SAHO responded by declaring the HSAS questions irrelevant to collective agreement negotiations, instead suggesting they are related to health policy. Instead, Antosh says the union refused to negotiate further until it gets the information, even if it has to use its own resources to do so.
"We believe that it would be more productive for HSAS to negotiate terms of conditions of employment for our valued employees whom they represent," Antosh states in her recent release.
"The union still has about 150 proposals on the table that are not being discussed because they are refusing to bargain.
"The union has had several months to research this information if they felt it was critical to achieving a collective agreement. Staffing levels have been addressed as appropriate by employers through policy and operations.
In the last three years the number of full time equivalents of this group of health care workers has increased by over 15 per cent, which would demonstrate that regional health authorities are responding to the needs of the populations served and that the employers are able to generally attract and retain the necessary employees."
However, HSAS president Cathy Dickson maintains the information is critical to the negotiations and chastises SAHO and the employers for not answering the union's questions.
"Health Sciences strongly believes the public has a right to know this kind of basic health care workplace information," Dickson states in her release issued the same day.
"Is SAHO saying health care employers are so inefficient they can't answer these workplace questions or are they trying to hide this information from the public because it will expose just how poorly they are providing health care services?
"We want to get on with helping to improve staffing levels, and helping to improve the recruitment and retention of these specialized professionals, so Saskatchewan patients will be better served. The intransigence of SAHO and health Care employers is all that stands in the way of this goal being met."
SHR representatives were not available for comment about the latest chapter in the contract negotiations. Individual regions are not allowed to comment on the provincial negotiations.
