Saskatoon City Hospital gets $15M to add acute care beds and hire new staff

WATCH: The provincial government announced major funding for Saskatoon City Hospital to increase capacity.

The Government of Saskatchewan announced a $15 million cash commitment for Saskatoon City Hospital on Friday to ease capacity issues.

The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) says the investment will help add 109 acute care beds at the hospital and hire over 500 additional staff and physicians over the next 12 to 16 months.

“It’s going to create a better experience for our patients and families,” SHA CEO Andrew Will said at a news conference in Saskatoon on Friday. “But it’s also going to create a better-equipped department that supports recruitment and retention of physicians and other staff as well.”

This comes at a time when the Emergency Department at Saskatoon City Hospital continues to reduce its hours due to a shortage of doctors.

In a release sent Friday afternoon, SHA said the reduced hours at the hospital have been extended until March 16 – it’s the fourth week in a row that the reduced hours at the ED have been extended.

City Hospital’s emergency department is normally open from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Since at least February 15, the department has been closing over two hours earlier.

SHA says Saskatoon’s health facilities serve as tertiary hospitals, providing health services to patients across the province, and have experienced increasing capacity pressures driven by population growth and increased demand for health services.

Will says on average, 55 patients across the three Saskatoon hospitals are waiting for an acute care bed at any given time. He says this announcement will make a major impact in addressing capacity issues.

“We know that recruitment is going to be one of our challenges,” said John Ash, vice president of integrated Saskatoon health. “So, we want to be able to work with the health care recruitment agency and our respective teams to ensure that we’re phasing in the appropriate staff to meet the four phases and achieve the 109 beds within the 12 to 16 months.”

However, the president of the nurses' union wonders where those 500 positions will come from during what she calls the worst nursing shortage in a decade.

“There needs to be more medicine beds to try to curb some of this downward pressure,” said Tracy Zambory, president of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN). “But we haven’t done anything to actually address the human resource issues.”

She says the beds aren’t necessarily new, as someone is being moved out of them to make space for acute care beds.

“They’re converted beds,” she said. “They’re beds that were there, and we’ve just moved the people out that were in them who were considered transition. Now we have to put those people somewhere else so we can make room for the medical beds that these are turning into.”

The SHA says this announcement will help increase acute care capacity in Saskatoon by 14 per cent.

-With files from Hayatullah Amanat