Four years after closing the emergency room at the hospital in Wolseley, Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) announced that limited emergency services are resuming.
An open house was held at Wolseley Memorial Integrated Care Centre (WMICC) on Ouimet Street last Friday so community members could meet new staff. Limited emergency service resumed at the facility on February 26 and the emergency room (ER) will continue to be open Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m., excluding statutory holidays. The ER should be accessed through the ambulance entrance, not the clinic or Lakeside Nursing Home entrances. Acute care services remain unavailable at this time.
In May 2020, SHA suspended emergency service at the Wolseley Hospital so the facility could be used for Alternative Level of Care (ALC) patients. Twelve community hospitals, including those in Wolseley and Broadview, were assigned this ALC designation at that time as part of SHA’s Covid-19 surge plan.
Like Broadview Hospital and other rural facilities, insufficient staffing presented a challenge to reopening the ER in Wolseley; yet municipal leaders diligently advocated for service resumption. The Town of Wolseley worked successfully with officials to begin implementing the province’s Health Human Resources Action Plan, designed to recruit and retain healthcare workers, so that limited emergency service could resume this week. SHA has created a multi-phased framework for increasing service availability based on appropriate staffing, so recruitment efforts will continue until full emergency service can be restored to the community.
“On behalf of Wolseley Town Council, I would like to express our excitement around the resumption of limited emergency services in the community,” said Mayor Gerry Hill. “The successful execution of the phased opening plans for the Wolseley Hospital is the result of extensive collaboration and hard work from various stakeholders, including the Ministry of Health, the SHA management team, WMICC employees, your local municipal members, and the general public To all of our new staff, I welcome you to your new community.”
