Health Human Resources Action Plan

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A message from Andrew Will, Interim CEO

Today, the Government of Saskatchewan announced a provincial Health Human Resources Action Plan. The plan is one of the most aggressive health-care initiatives in Saskatchewan’s history, aiming to build a stronger, more robust health-care workforce over the next several years.

As part of this action plan, multiple government ministries – in collaboration with the SHA, post-secondary schools and other partners – are activating a number strategies in four key areas, including:

  • Recruit: Accelerating and broadening recruitment efforts to create a steady supply of health-care workers;
  • Train: Expanding health sciences education and professional development opportunities for domestic students, and accelerating training and licensure for internationally educated health-care workers;
  • Incentivize: Offering an attractive suite of incentives to recruit and retain health-care workers;
  • Retain: Adding staffing and physician resources in key areas, advancing key mentorship and peer-to-peer support programs, supporting continuous learning, and other initiatives to help create a representative, diverse and inclusive workforce.

Overall, the plan includes an investment of more than $60 million to help stabilize and enhance our workforce, including a goal to add a thousand more professionals to our health system over the next several years.

To address our current challenges, it is critical that we make every effort to support implementation and execution of this plan. Your contributions and support will be key in advancing this important work.

While there are no overnight solutions, I am confident this plan includes the strategies and resources for addressing the issues our health-care teams are facing at the frontline. Like other jurisdictions in Canada, we have been facing an acute shortage of highly skilled health-care personnel that is creating service disruptions and straining our workforce. By pulling together and mobilizing support for this plan, we can significantly improve access to timely, high quality care in every corner of our province and provide relief to our teams.

Please know how valued you are and how grateful we are for the work you do for the people of our province. We recognize that the past several years battling COVID-19 and dealing with recruitment and retention challenges have created a significant burden for you and all our health-care teams. Thank you for your personal sacrifices and willingness to go above and beyond for those we serve.

We want to continue to evolve our recruitment and retention efforts to meet the changing needs within our work environments. Please reach out to your supervisors, managers and peers on ideas for improvements you feel would make a positive impact. In the weeks ahead, we will provide updates on our progress and details on how you can support us to stabilize and enhance services through this action plan and other initiatives.

Thank you again for your ongoing hard work on behalf of the patients, residents and families we serve.