Nurse practitioner outlines issues for women’s health in Sask.

More women in Saskatchewan are turning to nurse practitioners for healthcare due to gaps in the number of physicians available. Damian Smith has more.

Healthcare for Saskatchewan women continues to be a dilemma, leading many to turn to nurse practitioners. For women across the province, nurse practitioners say availability continues to be an issue.

“Not only access, but just quality of care,” said Dana Yee, a nurse practitioner at Revive IV & Wellness. “We just need to do whatever we can so that more people can see more providers and have safe, quality care, not just more access. It’s way more complex than people think of how to fix the issue, because it’s broken.”

As a private practitioner, Yee says the public system has gaps in the number of providers available, as well as time constraints due to short doctors’ appointments,

Yee offers hour-long appointments, which she says allows enough time for patients to voice all of their concerns and create a plan.

“I think the biggest thing that I hear is women not being heard, feeling that they go to any kind of health care provider, whether it’s their own provider or one that they just see,” she said. “They’re [the patients] taking on these huge symptoms of extreme pain issues in their cycle, mood issues, hormonal changes, and they’re not being heard. They’re being completely normalized.”

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Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill says that appointment lengths are up to individual practitioners.

“Physicians are compensated under a variety of different models in the province, whether that’s on a contract or on a fee for service basis,” he said on Wednesday morning. “Really, appointment lengths are up to the individual practitioner.”

In early March, the province opened up another round of nurse practitioner intakes in search of primary care for patients. That deadline passed in late March, which looks to recruit nurse practitioners that will ensure that every Saskatchewan family has access to a primary care provider by the end of 2028.

“This is not an ‘either or’ situation, this is an ‘and’ conversation that we need to have in our province,” he said. “We need more physicians and we need more nurse practitioners. I think that’s exactly why we’ve seen a lot of interest in expanding the role of nurse practitioners, but also the availability of nurse practitioners in the province.”

The latest provincial budget has set aside funding for additional nurse practitioner contracts and is putting a million dollars towards a pilot project to enable select nurse practitioners, in order to hire additional primary team members to increase access for patients.

According to Yee, common reasons for patients to visit Revive IV & Wellness are youth that need contraceptive care, women of childbearing age with cycle changes and fertility issues, women that need prenatal care, and those in perimenopause and menopause stages of their life.