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Rural communities need emergency room service

Rural Saskatchewan residents tend to be very proud of their hospitals and health centres. These facilities set this province apart.
Arcola Health Centre
Emergency Services are temporarily closed at the Arcola Health Centre.

Rural Saskatchewan residents tend to be very proud of their hospitals and health centres.

These facilities set this province apart. You can go into a community with a couple thousand people, or even a few hundred people, and find a quality facility whose staff provide excellent care to the people of that community and the communities surrounding it.

It’s always been a part of rural life in Saskatchewan. And you won’t find these types of facilities in small communities in other parts of the country, unless those communities are remote or very isolated.

The staff who work in these rural centres are highly skilled and well-trained, and committed to where they live. And since they’re in a small town or even a village, these doctors, nurses and other employees are going to have a level of connection to the townspeople that you won’t find in a big city.

So when the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) released a plan last month as part of its response to COVID-19 that showed 12 health facilities, including Arcola and Oxbow, could be temporarily converted to what the SHA classified as alternate levels of care (ALC), you knew people would be concerned.

And when that conversion began, these rural residents were furious.

Arcola was part of Phase 2. The announcement that it would be converted to ALC set off a firestorm of criticism on social media and elsewhere in the community. One Arcola resident had a particularly poignant story of how she believes that having a facility like the Arcola Health Centre in her community saved her son’s life.

Oxbow, meanwhile, was part of Phase 3. You knew that when Arcola became an ALC, Oxbow wouldn’t be far behind. (It took about a week).

People in these areas should be frustrated, and not just because their health centre is losing services.

They should be agitated with the lack of communication. Yes, the SHA announced they could potentially convert facilities to ALC status back in April. But then there should have been more advanced notice.

They could have given these communities at least a week’s notice, but they didn’t. Most only received a day or two of warning.

There also wasn’t a statement on their website, or a social media post, or an emailed press release that the change was coming.

People would have still been ticked off to see their facility switched to ALC status, but they wouldn’t have been able to complain about the process as much.

It’s also frustrating that this comes at a time when COVID-19 cases are generally low for most of the province. Yes, there is still a large number of active cases in the far north.

But as of Sunday afternoon, there were 12 active cases in the rest of the province. The provincial recovery rate, outside of the far north, is around 96 per cent.

The south region, which spans from the Alberta border to the U.S. border, and extends north of Highway 1 in some areas, had one case on Thursday – the first diagnosed case since April 4. (In keeping with SHA policy, the location of that case was not disclosed, but it could be anywhere from Consul to Gainsborough).

The Regina area and central region had no active cases.

If we were suffering through case numbers seen in Ontario and Quebec, or in northern Saskatchewan, then people might understand why such facility conversions are necessary.

We have relatively low case numbers because we’ve all done our part to keep numbers low. We’ve followed the regulations, changed plans, cancelled or postponed events, said no to social gatherings and avoided visiting family members in nursing homes because that was the order from the government.

You can’t fault people in the communities losing services for thinking they’re being punished for doing the right thing.

At this point in time, it appears you’re more likely to be in the health centre in Arcola or Oxbow because of an injury suffered in a farming on an oilfield incident, or some other accident, than for COVID-19.

People who are hurt in an on the farm accident in the Arcola area shouldn’t have to travel to Redvers or Estevan or Weyburn for care.

They also don’t know how long this conversion will last.

We understand the pressures facing the SHA at this time. And they were in a no-win situation when it came to converting facilities to ALC status. But a few modifications in how they handled this situation might have eased some of the anger from the public.