The NDP Shadow Minister for Health, Vicki Mowat, says Saskatchewan’s healthcare system is in crisis. She states that emergency rooms are overcrowded, staff are burning out and patients are paying the consequences. Mowat points out that patients are being treated in hallways and the wait times in the Emergency Departments are too long. She introduced Fran Forsberg, a mother who took her child, a youth with mental health challenges, to the RUH Emergency Department twice over three days.

Forsberg says the first time they waited 12 hours before leaving and the second time, they were there for another six hours before being seen. She and her child and everyone else including parents with children witnessed things she believes shouldn’t have been happening in the waiting room, like a woman who had been there for at least six hours who had a heart attack in the emergency department and someone else who was bleeding profusely and passed out. In another instance, an elderly woman had been brought in by ambulance and after about six to eight hours, she asked if she could go back home, and she offered to pay for the ambulance to do so. Then, about a week ago, Forsberg’s 22-year-old daughter had her tonsil removed, but ended up in the Emergency Department later because she was hemorrhaging in her throat. Forsberg says there was no available operating room for her throat to be cauterized, so they did it without it being numbed first.

Forsberg is challenging the Premier and his Caucus to all go to a busy emergency department and witness over the course of six to eight hours what happens around them. She suggests you don’t know what it’s like until you have experienced it.

Last fall, the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses stated that the emergency in RUH was at 350 per cent capacity. Mowat says the Recruitment and Retention plan has failed and the government is not retaining people at the rates they are saying it is.