Saskatchewan backs up ‘Patients First’ plan with $8.47B health care budget

Most of Saskatchewan’s budget is going to health care as the province works to improve access and reduce wait times, in part by hiring more staff. Laura Woodwar

It’s no wonder why the Ministry of Health represents the single largest portion of the provincial budget.

“We listened to Saskatchewan people, and the top two concerns we have heard are affordability, and access to health care,” Finance Minister Jim Reiter told reporters as he outlined the province’s plans for how to allocate your tax dollars to improve a health system facing significant growing pains.

Wednesday’s $8.47 billion Ministry of Health, a nearly five per cent increase over last year, should come with few surprises. Premier Scott Moe offered a glimpse of the strategy in a press conference last week.

“[This budget] protects patients by investing in the patients first health care plan announced last week so everyone can get the right care, in the right place, at the right time,” said Reiter.

With outstanding commitments to increase access to family medicine, reduce persistent bottlenecks in emergency care and ambulatory services, improve access to addiction and mental health treatment, and reduce wait times for surgery and diagnostics — there are a lot of promises to keep.

With that roadmap, the ministry is moving ahead on all fronts.

It’s committed over $635 million for capital investments to build and upgrade facilities across the province, including long-term care homes, to significantly boost the number of hospital beds in Saskatoon and to finish building the city’s urgent care centre.

When it comes to the system-wide commitments to increase staffing levels, transform primary care and reduce wait times, there’s less resemblance between the roadmap and the territory.

A major pillar of the patients first plan was to centre Nurse Practitioners (NPs) at the locus of primary care.

To that end, the Ministry of Health is spending just under $12 million contracting additional nurse practitioners (NP). About $1 million of that funding is intended as a pilot to allow clinics run by nurse practitioners to expand their support teams by hiring RNs or LPNs.

Regina’s Urgent Care Centre is also getting a boost to cover the cost of additional staff. The facility was intended to provide around-the-clock service, but has repeatedly fallen short of that goal due a shortage of medical staff.

With the construction of Saskatoon’s urgent care facility expected to wrap up in 2027, the province says it’s increasing funding to build a full care team in advance of the opening.

That facility will have to compete with the city’s hospitals for staff, as the ministry is hoping to relieve capacity pressures at those sites by adding 60 permanent inpatient beds between Royal University Hospital and St. Paul’s Hospital, and creating more ICU beds.

It’s on recruiting and retaining medical staff for these expansions that the government’s healthcare strategy met the most pointed criticism from the official opposition.

NDP Leader Carla Beck cast doubt on Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill’s ability to find staff to support the expanded services and new patient beds.

She says the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) has a hard enough time filling existing positions as many nurses and EMTs end up leaving the professions in frustration.

“They’re not going to turn around the rates of health care workers leaving the province, leaving the profession, unless they sit down with those healthcare workers and work out the reasons that they’re leaving in the first place,” she told reporters in a scrum on Wednesday.

Looking to a longer timeline, the budget has allocated funds to increase the number of seats in the province’s nursing programs and medical school, and subsidizing the cost of tuition for RNs who wish to upgrade to become NPs.

Paramedics and emergency communications staff have also come forward in recent months demanding better wages and mental health supports for their profession, which many end up leaving after just three years.

The budget tries to address those concerns, offering a $14.3 million increase to emergency medical services across the province to improve response times, reduce workload pressures by diverting less-urgent 911 calls to other providers, and offering additional mental health support.

Recovery, by hook or by crook

With an investment of over $673 million in the 2026-27 budget to support mental health and addictions programs, Minister Lori Carr is celebrating at the midway point of the government’s action plan to get more people into drug treatment under its “recovery-oriented” approach.

The 2026-27 budget has dedicated a $9.6 million increase toward expanding this system of care — some of which will fund new complex needs facilities Prince Albert and North Battleford, expanding on pre-existing facilities in Saskatoon and Regina.

The facilities were partly designed to replace the use of police holding cells as a “drunk tank.” Intoxicated people who have a “high potential of being a danger to themselves or others” are delivered there and put under lock and key to stabilize while being monitored by medical staff.

The province says this funding will also initiate the first phase of its broader plan to force drug users into treatment.

The Compassionate Intervention Act is a model where adults deemed “unable to ask for help” will receive treatment, whether they like it or not.

Carr says $23 million of the mental health and addictions budget will help create about 200 more addiction treatment spaces across the province. That includes $10.8 million that will pay for a six-bed secure youth detox site at the Calder Centre in Saskatoon and help expand rapid access counselling services for adults.

The budget also provides $3 million to improve the system, including by continuing to develop a central intake and navigation system that allows patients to self-refer for treatment.