Health care officials on both sides of the border will cooperate to try and meet the demand for long-term care in the Flin Flon-Creighton region.
A joint working group is being organized between Mamawetan Churchill River Health Region (MCRHR) in northern Saskatchewan and the Northern Health Region (NHR) in northern Manitoba.
Andrew McLetchie, CEO of MCRHR, touched on the cross-border cooperation in briefing notes he used while addressing Creighton area seniors at a Nov. 10 meeting.
Twyla Storey, communications coordinator or the NHR, confirmed the joint working group is being established.
The group will “clearly The group will “clearly identify issues and develop strategies to inform/advise both provincial governments on those issues [around long-term care needs in the Flin Flon-Creighton area],” Storey wrote in an email.
This comes amid growing demand for a personal care home for the Creighton area. Creighton seniors must currently relocate across the border to Flin Flon when they require long-term care.
Greg Ottenbreit, minister of Rural and Remote Health for Saskatchewan, visited Creighton and Denare Beach in early October, meeting with both municipalities’ mayors and stakeholders about the issue.
He followed up this meeting with a letter to the two mayors earlier this month.
In his letter, Ottenbreit affirmed his understanding of residents’ worries about access to long-term care beds in the local area and encouraged council to work with MCRHR and the NHR to develop a proposal and a plan.
He explained that the Ministry of Health does not directly fund construction of long-term care facilities; health regions handle those projects.
Ottenbreit also suggested, as a possible alternative, reaching out to developers to build a privately owned and operated personal care home, either as a for-profit or not-for-profit entity.
He added that Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Social Services can provide financial assistance to help seniors pay care home fees.
Storey said the NHR would be open to this option.
“The Northern Health Region agrees that there is a need for supportive housing and we would support the idea of a developer exploring that option as it would relieve the pressure on long-term care,” she said.
MCRHR currently has a proposal to build a 70-bed personal care home in La Ronge, a four-hour-plus drive from Creighton.
As Lorene Bonnet, a Creighton alderwoman and member of an MCRHR advisory board, noted, the La Ronge project is not seen as beneficial to her community.
“They got the message that Creighton people, and people in surrounding areas, are not going to La Ronge for long-term care,” said Bonnet, referring to a July meeting at which an MCRHR consultant spoke of the La Ronge proposal.
The MCRHR is now studying long-term health care needs in the region, according to McLetchie’s briefing notes for the Nov. 10 meeting.
According to the notes, the next steps identified in the process include meetings with the NHR and Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, and working with stakeholders to develop a business case for long-term care for residents on the east side of the MCRHR.
Concerns over the Creighton area’s lack of a personal care home have reached a crescendo this year.
In September, Cumber-land MLA Doyle Vermette distributed a petition affirming that Creighton area residents would be unwilling to move to La Ronge for long-term care.
The petition called on the Saskatchewan government to invest in a long-term care facility in the Creighton and Denare Beach area.
