Sask NDP Announce Wait Time Plan
Health wait times is one of the areas where even New Democrats admit that there is some work that can be done.
Luckily, we are:
Premier Lorne Calvert today announced several new initiatives to further strengthen and preserve public health care in Saskatchewan. In addition to announcing plans for a second surgical care centre, this one to be located in Saskatoon, the Premier says an NDP government will expand cancer screening and prevention programs."Publicly funded and operated day surgery centres make good sense, helping to free up hospital space and resources for more complex procedures, while reducing surgical and diagnostic wait times," Calvert said. "With two day surgery centres, including the one underway in Regina, wait times will be reduced significantly and patients will receive their day procedures more quickly."
Once fully operational, the Regina surgical centre will be equipped to perform up to 10,000 surgical and diagnostic procedures each year, and the one in Saskatoon will perform up to 20,000. These procedures may include cataract surgeries; ear, nose and throat surgeries; joint arthroscopies; biopsies; and hernia repairs. Approximately 75,000 operating room procedures were completed last year; more than half were day surgeries.
It is only part of the solution, not the whole package, but it is a good step forward.
4 comments:
Just amazing how the NDP can keep finding all these new offerings. Have they been sitting on them for 16 years?
So after 16 years the NDP are finally going to do something about Healthcare?!
We have the longest wait times in the country!
Nurses are forced to use 30-year old equipment bought second hand from Alberta and B.C!!!
And now we can afford to spend another billion dollars on free drugs!
Well at least I will have free pain killers while I wait for my surgery!
We can do better.
When you have to wait months for surgery so you can walk again, and you can't even pay the state to fix the most seriously wrong problem in your life, it takes more than campaign promises to fix that. What's the point of a capitalist society if we can't buy the things most important to us, even if that thing is health?
You may be able to do better, and that looks like what Calvert is proposing.
If Wall's at all taking from Gordon Campbell's 'First We Get Elected' handbook, his promises will remain generic, because in the end what he has planned for your health care system is radical surgery. Eliminating long-term staff for privatized options that supposedly 'save you money'. Leave that line to the ING guy, because in BC we got a load of crap, terrible food, bacteria-inducing sicknesses on the rise due to lax sanitary standards as supplied by the private for-profit contractor. In other words, a lot of hooey all for a slogan of free enterprise and punishing the little guy. I like Calvert's plan. Who says a gov't can't introduce new policies and direction during a campaign?
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