In the News
Consequences of Anti-Social Offensive on Health Care Systems
Voices of Concern over Direction of Saskatchewan Health Care Sector
Saskatchewan unions in the health care professions say no concrete discussions have taken place regarding the problem of staff shortages and how this problem should be addressed. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan said it has had “no recent contact with, or recent discussions with” the provincial government about the “possible licensure of internationally-trained physicians.”
Barbara Cape, the President of Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-West said the union has not been consulted, adding SEIU-West asked for clarity from the Ministry of Health on its plan to recruit a large number of health care workers from the Philippines “but nobody has any answers.”
“They are not looking locally, and then act globally,” Cape said regarding the problem of lack of trained personnel. “There are no partnerships right now with First Nations and Métis communities about upgrading education, about creating some opportunities here at home.”
Barbara Cape said there are 1,400 health care vacancies across the province, with other hard-to-recruit positions unfilled including medical radiation technologists, vital techs, EMTs and cooks.
“I think we need to be serious about recruitment,” she said, “but we also need to be serious about retaining the people we currently have.”
Also, she added, “I think it is important for us to recognize that the Philippines has just gone through a natural disaster. So recruiting from the Philippines during a natural disaster seems, you know, not a great idea.”
Cape refers to a powerful typhoon last December that caused widespread damage in the Philippines and left at least 375 dead, 50 others missing and a half million people forced to live in emergency shelters, not to speak of the added difficulty of the global pandemic. The Saskatchewan Ministry talks as if COVID has not affected the Philippines and severely stretched its own medical facilities and personnel. Almost no vaccines have been made available to the people there while Canada and other developed countries seek to poach their trained health care personnel.
“There are health systems all across the United States; there are health authorities all across Canada, who are going to the exact same place we are – to the Philippines,” Cape said. “There are governments all across the globe that are going to the Philippines, to bring health care workers into their systems.”
No thought is given to the needs of the health care and education sectors in the Philippines and how the developed countries should be assisting them, not stealing from them.
Tracy Zambory, President of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, said the province, instead of taking trained people from poor countries, “(needs) a fulsome concrete health human resource strategy. We have to be looking at the retention of what we have, of our registered nurses that are here. We have to be making sure that we are having conversations with the Indigenous community.”
Zambory said recruitment for rural and remote areas of Saskatchewan, and retention generally throughout the province, have long been problems. Rural and remote positions used to have financial incentives but those have been cut, which has made the situation worse.
(Workers’ Forum, posted January 28, 2022)
