Sask. NDP shares leaked memo about AIMS rollout problems

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Saskatchewan’s official opposition is once again raising concerns about the current government’s management of the health-care system.

Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck and health-care critic Viki Mowat held a media conference Wednesday near the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital to highlight issues with the Administrative Information Management System (AIMS) payment processing system.

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Beck said the party recently received a leaked memo, which was provided to media. It acknowledged and apologized to physicians for late payments and said a task force is working to resolve the problems.

Beck said the people who supplied the memo told her that the doctors affected include those working in Saskatoon emergency rooms. Doctors are not the only ones being shortchanged by the payment system, she added.

“We already knew that nurses, autism interventionists and other health-care workers in the province are not being paid on time.”

Beck said the payment issues caused by the AIMS system are creating another hurdle in dealing with the current staffing challenges in the province’s health-care system.

“Stuff like this are reasons that we have some of the worse retention rates for health-care workers in the entire country,” she said.

Affected workers she has spoken with are further frustrated by the payment issues on top of dealing with other operational challenges, Beck said. The NDP has heard about health-care workers having to take out lines of credit in order to pay their bills on time, she told media.

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“There aren’t a lot of people in the province who can go a few extra days, let alone a longer amount of time, without getting paid.”

Mowat called on the Saskatchewan Party government to follow the recommendations in a provincial auditor’s report released last fall and investigate the implementation of the AIMS system. Mowat said putting in place the new payment system has already proved costly.

“Health-care workers aren’t getting paid and the cost of this trainwreck program has tripled, from $86 million to at least $240 million,” she said.

Talk about bringing in the AIMS system first began in 2018, and in the fall of 2022 there was a brief rollout which had to aborted due to technical issues, Mowat noted. She said the system was reintroduced this summer.

“It’s been a six-year process and tripled the cost and it’s not over yet; we’ve been told that only about one-third of the system has been changed.”

When questioned by media about possible solutions to the current issues, Mowat said it’s difficult to talk about solutions when it’s not entirely clear where the problems are in the current payment system, and it’s not clear how many people are affected.

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“There’s been such a lack of transparency on this. We need to open that up, get that investigation before we know what’s possible for a way forward.”

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