‘Change the conversation’: Nurse retention forum aiming to address Sask. healthcare challenges

Healthcare workers gathered in Regina to discuss the challenges of recruiting and retaining staff in the country’s healthcare system. Donovan Maess reports.

Nurses, unions and health organizations from across Western Canada are in Regina brainstorming ways to address the province’s healthcare needs.

The Saskatchewan Nurse Retention Forum discussed varying experiences and brought forward some suggestions to improve the system.

Darla Rugland, a nurse of 22 years, says the current state of healthcare is stacked against workers who are doing their best to support patients.

“All we want to do is take very good care of our patients and our clientele and have them get well and to go home,” she told CTV News Thursday. “But when you’re feeling like you have failed, even though you did the very best that you could, that’s very morale killing.”

“The other thing is respect in the healthcare field, not only just for our coworkers, but from patients and our employer,” Rugland added.

She went on to say that feeling is forcing professionals out of the workforce.

“You can recruit everybody but if nobody’s staying, it’s just a perpetual revolving door,” Rugland described. “And unfortunately, that revolving door has financial and emotional costs; It has cost to the people we’re serving in Saskatchewan.”

These are the issues the forum hoped to address.

Author of ‘Billion Dollar Blindspot’ Raelynn Douglas believes the inability to keep workers is putting years of investment into healthcare to waste.

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“We’ve been doing this for decades,” she said. “You can say, ‘Well, it’s agency costs and the cost of recruitment. We need to bring more in, we need more supply.’ There are thousands of people who are looking for work or who want to work in Saskatchewan.”

“Let’s figure out a way to get them in the system, and not just get them in, but keep them,” Douglas added.

Through the ‘Patients First Healthcare Plan,’ the provincial government aims to perform 450,000 surgeries over four years and reduce wait times to a 90-day target. It also plans to open up the scope of works for a number of different professionals.

Nurse practitioners are at the cornerstone of the plan, with the ministry looking to hire plenty more and place them in a number of different settings to allow residents to see them as a first point of contact in the system.

Saskatchewan plans to have more nurse practitioners in emergency rooms, urgent care centres and long term care homes. To achieve this, the province has opened up roughly 100 training spots, with 83 dedicated to Saskatchewan residents. Since 2022, the number of training seats has nearly doubled.

Incentive programs for registered nurses to become nurse practitioners provide $78,000 over two years to help ease financial burdens over the two years of necessary schooling.

The NDP opposition says the plan is not working.

“It’s a difficult sell to recruit and retain people in healthcare when you let a large portion of your workforce be without a reasonable raise and a collective bargaining agreement for four years, I start there,” NDP leader Carla Beck told reporters at a news conference Thursday.

“This has been the piece that is, in some ways, the lowest hanging fruit for this government, respect to your health care workers, listen to them, get to them to the table.”

In response to CTV News, the province says it is working to build a stronger, more robust health-care workforce through our Health Human Resources Action Plan.

“Through recruitment, training, incentives and retention initiatives, our plan ensures Saskatchewan remains an attractive place for health-care professionals to live, work and build a career,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement.

“Saskatchewan remains competitive as one of the best places for physicians to live and work. An agreement has been reached with Saskatchewan physicians that supports efforts to recruit, train and retain physicians in the province.”

Douglas applauded the Sask Party’s plan for recruitment, but said retaining professionals is a larger discussion.

“We’ve been focusing on recruitment, training and incentives now, but the retention solutions – I think – need to be rigorous and a little bit more innovative,” she suggested. “We just need to change the conversation to not just think about it as a funding problem, of a lack of funding, but more as an efficiency in how we’re investing.”

“My metaphor is ‘You can fill the boat, but if there’s a hole,’ right?”

Rugland hoped forums like this, with many different voices coming together, are a good start.

“It needs to be solved on multiple levels,” she added. “It needs to be staff engagement to start with because unhappy workers are not going to stay.”

The Canadian Union of Public employees says it will be taking the heard experiences and suggestions from Thursday’s forum to the legislature as part of a rally Friday morning.

With files from Keenan Sorokan