Lewis: Sask. Party, NDP health platforms lack guts, innovation

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According to a September Insightrix/CTV poll, health care is the top issue that will influence voters’ choices in the upcoming Saskatchewan election. Wait times are long. ERs are overflowing. Primary care is a fiasco. Public health trembles under a bushel. Morale is in the tank.

Given the (possible) political stakes, one would have expected the Saskatchewan Party and NDP to sculpt bold and creative health platforms.

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Perhaps they did, and produced ideas of such dazzling wattage that posting them on their websites would have imperilled the ocular health of all who beheld them. No retinas are at risk from what remains.

Neither platform is original, transformative, inspirational or convincing. The parties have stumbled into a weary consensus: make a big system bigger but not different.

Promise to lure the out-of-province and offshore doctors and nurses that every other province is going after. Play whack-a-mole with oddly specific problems. Add money and stir.

The platform details are in themselves pedestrian; notably they focus on symptoms without tackling their root causes. For the Saskatchewan Party, cervical cancer — 15 deaths per year — is top of mind. There is no mystery about how to save lives.

Promote the hell out of HPV vaccination in childhood to boost the current 70 per cent uptake to the national target of 90 per cent. Reinforce with fact-based safer sex education in schools. And because most, but not all, infections are preventable, follow risk-based screening, testing and monitoring protocols.

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The Saskatchewan Party’s Big Idea? Home HPV testing kits. The best place for high risk and often transient young people to be tested, monitored, counselled and begin treatment is a primary care clinic.

Many don’t have a regular source of care — a problem neither acknowledged nor targeted — or a reliable mailing address. To expect the most vulnerable to know about, use and act on the results of self-testing kits is magical thinking.

This makes the unsurprising silence on vaccination and safer sex education even more damning. It is a choice to fail.

For the NDP, the only benefit of 17 years in exile is the entitlement to saddle the incumbents with the baggage of underachievement. Yet there is no mention of the 200,000 people without a primary care home.

Not a glove is laid on the Saskatchewan Party’s costly, futile and obsolete health workforce strategy. Neither party makes even the gentlest observation about the enormous waste of talent in the system, the result of an inefficient and demoralizing division of labour.

The NDP proposes a health human resources roundtable to “assess the current workforce and plan for the future.” This is where professions convene to pay homage to collaboration, teamwork and putting patients first, and go home to their war rooms to plot how to preserve and expand their turf and outfox each other.

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No breakthrough is possible without challenging a siloed and rigid health science education system, a fragmented and bloated regulatory apparatus, and collective agreements ill-suited to a highly fluid environment. None gets a mention by either party. Leadership takes vision and guts.

The Saskatchewan Party declares that the system is “on track” to meet the three-month target for non-urgent surgery, in the way that I am “on track” to make the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Yet the NDP sets no targets and has nothing to say about the chaotic non-management that allows some patients to wait five times as long as others.

The system is manifestly unfit to deal with its biggest challenge: an aging and more complex population. Frightening numbers of older adults have lost their family doctors to retirement. Neither party offers any healthy aging strategy, let alone an innovative one.

Rome is burning, and the parties have brought a few watering cans and a lot of fiddles. Failure comes in two flavours. Where evidence and ideology clash, the Saskatchewan Party too often opts for ignorance that plays to the superstitions of its base.

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The NDP lacks reformist zeal and declines to speak uncomfortable truths.

We can debate whether cynical politics begat a disengaged and distrustful electorate or vice-versa. Regardless, the health-care platforms symbolize the decline. None are so blind as those who will not see.

Steven Lewis spent 45 years as a health policy analyst and health researcher in Saskatchewan. He can be reached at slewistoon1@gmail.com.

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