Regina hospital workers raise alarm bells over staff, patient safety

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Gerri Grant left her interventional radiology technologist job of 17 years after witnessing how short-staffing affected patient care and the well-being of her colleagues.

“I couldn’t handle it anymore,” said Grant from the Saskatchewan Legislative Building this week.

She wrestled with the fact that, by exiting the department, her colleagues would be in a worse position with even fewer people on staff. Since resigning in the summer of 2024, she’s heard that things have only gotten worse.

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“I gave up a really fabulous, engaging career,” said Grant, who still works in health care. “Watching my co-workers struggle, myself struggle with that work-life balance — we were taking on-call hours at an excessive rate … watching patients suffer — I couldn’t see that anymore.”

This week, the Saskatchewan NDP published a letter from Grant and 14 other health-care workers at the Regina General Hospital concerning conditions in the interventional radiology department. The letter describes how workers “are experiencing overwhelming challenges due to chronic understaffing, poor communication, and increasing operational efficiencies.”

In addition, the letter says a culmination of issues has created “both direct-patient and staff-safety concerns” as workers describe how a lack of adequate physician coverage “has already resulted in cases where patients did not receive life-saving interventions in time.”

Grant said she could not speak to specifics of such occurrences but noted that any time there is a delay in critical medicine, “you’re going to have negative patient outcomes.”

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On Thursday, Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said the government has already signed contracts with private radiology groups based out of Regina that should “help stabilize radiology services.”

Cockrill said while he had only recently seen the letter in question, there was an awareness of issues within the department that ultimately led to the contracts.

“Once these teams are set up in the hospitals, I expect that patients will see better access to care,” he said, though there was no word on when services would see the impact of those agreements.

The provincial government has often cited its efforts to address health-care staffing through the Health Human Resources (HHR) Action Plan.

However, Grant said “I don’t even know what that is.”

According to the government, the action plan works to “recruit, train, incentivize and retain health-care workers to strengthen our provincial health-care workforce.”

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The letter, which was leaked to the NDP Opposition, first came across the desk of CUPE 5430 President Bashir Jalloh in mid-April but the issues were flagged even before that when the union did a survey of technologists.

“Eighty-eight per cent of respondents said that their workload has increased significantly over the past five years, with staff shortages being a major problem,” said Jalloh in an interview Friday.

“Over 90 per cent of them say the workload has significantly impacted patient quality and patient safety.”

Jalloh said he’s appreciative that the health minister will sit down and listen to concerns, but action is needed. Within the letter, there are nine action items related to recruitment, retention, shortages and more that he would like to see the government address.

“Are they putting anything in motion? We don’t know,” said Jalloh.

The union represents approximately 13,600 workers spanning several classifications and jobs within the health-care field. Dionne Wagner, an area representative for CUPE, said the current status of health care in Saskatchewan — and compounding issues of pay, staffing, treatment of employees and communication — is sending workers to other provinces.

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“We just can’t seem to keep them in Saskatchewan,” said Wagner, adding it’s no wonder that staff retention is an issue when many workers are taking on 36-hour shifts.

“People are completely burnt out.”

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