Provincial organization SARM wants the government to bring back its NP program as a way to deal with medical staff shortages in rural communities. (Photo 154361322 © Anton Petrychenko | Dreamstime.com)

By Julia Lovett-Squires

Nurse Practitioners

Organization wants province to bring nurse practitioner program back

Mar 4, 2024 | 2:53 PM

Rural communities in Saskatchewan are facing medical shortages and are looking to add to their medical arsenal.

As a result, Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) wants the provincial government to bring back their Grow Your Own Nurse Practitioner Program.

During the organization’s mid-term convention last fall, the Saskatchewan Association of Nurse Practitioners (SANP) gave a presentation in which they relayed concerns they were seeing in smaller communities around the province.

“We’ve heard concerns from our members too and this is a relationship to getting enough nurse practitioners out in rural Saskatchewan,” said Ray Orb, SARM president of their efforts to make sure clinics and smaller hospitals have staff available.

In a press release, SARM said as of last April, there were 328 NPs in the province and of those, 10 per cent are working as registered nurses, though there were vacancies available in their field.

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“We value the service that nurse practitioners provide,” he said of the health care professionals who work with doctors and are licensed and regulated.

In a statement to battlefordsNOW, the government said NPs are a “key part of the health care system” and that “significant investments” have been made by the Ministry of Health.

“The province is currently offering an annual intake of 50 NP training seats at the (University of Saskatchewan), (University of Regina) and Saskatchewan Polytechnic. This is an increase of 30 seats since 2007-08. This increase has enabled more NPs to be trained in Saskatchewan,” the ministry said in the statement.

NPs wanted

Orb said by bringing back the initiative from 2014, it would “add some enhancements I guess to the existing programs and hopefully we’ll get a resurgence of some of the NPs that we need out in rural Saskatchewan.”

In the SARM release, Johanne Rust, nurse practitioner and president of SANP said, “At this time, it is crucial that we employ or fully utilize all NPs, or we will lose this valuable group of professionals to other provinces like Alberta where the job opportunities and wages for NPs are much more attractive.”

The Ministry of Health explained they also have training options that extend beyond the classroom to include online training that allows students to stay closer to home along with “the main provider of grant funding to support the recruitment and retention of NPs, including a relocation grant and a bursary.”

According to Orb, the idea behind the program his group hopes the government will bring back gave people who already had some medical knowledge the chance to get the training they need to comeback and live in their home communities.

“Those are the kind of things we would like to see,” he said.

“People that have their families already established in rural Saskatchewan and they’ve got a working relationship and things like that in their own community and we see a value to be able to do that,” said Orb, noting those living in a larger centre may not want to commute or relocate.

Incentives and recruitment

The ministry said this past year two NPs who agreed to serve in a community for three years received $50,000 each as part of the Rural and Remote Recruitment Incentive (RRRI), while over 20 students who agreed to one year of service were given $2,000 from the Final Clinical Placement Bursary.

As such, both SARM and SANP are asking the government to enhance and expand incentives.

“Once they’re there, we’re more confident that they will stay there if they’ve got full time work available to them,” Orb said.

“Why would you not want live in rural Saskatchewan, and I think it’s incumbent I think on organizations like SARM and our rural communities to promote the rural communities not only to people that live in our province but also people that live outside the province.”

In the ministry’s statement, they have increased the number of physicians by more than 1,000 over the last 17 years and note that according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the province has a “higher-than-average number of physicians located in rural areas.”

Meetings with government

Orb, meanwhile, said it’s all about recruitment strategy.

“We’ve seen some evidence lately where nurses and some NPs are willing to move into Saskatchewan because compared to a lot of the other provinces, we have a less expensive cost of living,” he said.

“That’s an attraction that we need to promote.”

The organization has a meeting with Minister of Health Everett Hindley Minister Timothy McLeod of Mental Health and Addictions, Seniors and Rural and Remote Health this week and Orb said SARM is fortunate because the government is aware of the challenges and may be open to bringing the program back.

“In a lot of cases they are the first contact and of course they can refer patients to physicians and so, I compare it to a cog in a wheel, where we have doctors, nurses of course, paramedics, (Emergency Medical Technicians), but we also have nurse practitioners and I think they have to work together.”

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julia.lovettsquires@pattisonmedia.com

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