REGINA - Today, Official Opposition Health Critic Vicki Mowat and Ethics and Democracy Critic Meara Conway put Premier Scott Moe on blast after his government issued a confidential memo to healthcare workers demanding they shut up and stay silent about the state of healthcare in Saskatchewan.
“The Sask. Party government is running our hospitals into the ground and muzzling the nurses and doctors trying to speak up,” said Mowat. “We’re in a national competition to hire and retain healthcare workers. This government should be listening to healthcare workers, not silencing and censoring them.”
On February 7, Opposition MLAs visited the town of Lanigan as a part of the Saskatchewan NDP’s province-wide Healthcare Solutions and Consultation Outreach. While meeting with the Mayor and Council and healthcare workers offsite, a confidential muzzling-memo was issued to employees of the Lanigan Hospital.
The muzzling-memo stated that hospital employees were forbidden from answering questions or providing any information to Opposition MLAs. Any and all questions, the muzzling-memo states, must be directed to “Central Coordination.”
Yesterday, Minister of Rural and Remote Health Everett Hindley said the criticism that his government is centralizing healthcare decision making in the Premier’s office and failing to listen to frontline healthcare workers “could not be more wrong.”
“This muzzling-memo raises serious questions about the Sask. Party’s credibility when it comes to healthcare,” said Conway. “The Sask. Party’s decision to centralize health regions has not improved our hospitals or made waits shorter. If anything, we’ve seen repeated attempts by this current government to politicize healthcare decision-making and silence healthcare workers from speaking out.”
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