Saskatchewan’s only health line went down over the weekend, while one of Saskatoon’s hospitals reduced its emergency room hours.
According to the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), On Saturday from 4:55 p.m. to 5:35 p.m., HealthLine 811 was down.
It meant anyone seeking medical attention either needed to call 911, or visit a walk-in clinic or the emergency room.
However, an update on the SHA’s social media pages said at 6:30 p.m. the services were back up.
https://x.com/SaskHealth/status/1893459070826291244
The NDP is voicing their concerns on the malfunction, saying the “failure with no backup plan is unacceptable.”
“It’s concerning all around when people don’t have access to these emergency services when and where they need them,” Saskatchewan health critic Vicki Mowat said.
While it may not be a long stretch of time, Mowat said this points to a larger issue in the Saskatchewan health-care system. She referenced low staff levels, health care burnout and a lack of family doctors as some of the main issues.
“This month alone, the Saskatoon City Hospital emergency room cut hours due to doctor shortages,” Mowat explained. “Beauval’s health centre had no nursing services for 10 days. Porcupine Plain and Tisdale’s Ers were closed on the same day.”
SHA said HealthLine 811 was unavailable due to a technical issue with SaskTel.
“The short down time for HealthLine 811 did not impact access to emergency services,” SHA said in a statement.
Saskatchewan Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill spoke about the issue on Monday.
“In a world that’s increasingly virtual or tele-health based, 811 is a pretty significant part of our health-care system now,” Cockrill said. “Luckily the outage was only a couple of hours. We’ll be working with the ministry to understand the issue and understand maybe what we missed.”
The minister also addressed Saskatoon City Hospital’s reduced hours saying he’s met with SHA within the past week and is meeting with ER staff regularly to understand the struggles.
“The challenges that we have with Saskatoon City Hospital I expect that they will persist for a little while longer as we stabilize staffing,” Cockrill said.