The waiting room at Regina General Hospital’s emergency department spilled into hallways last Tuesday, as Darla Winsjansen sat beside her 78-year-old father for over nine hours. His chronic heart condition had worsened overnight, but with no family doctor to call, the emergency room was their only option.
“This isn’t what healthcare should look like,” Winsjansen told me, her voice tight with frustration. “Dad’s specialist retired last year, and we’ve been on waiting lists for a new family doctor for almost 18 months. The ER doctors are doing their best, but they don’t know his history.”
Stories like Winsjansen’s have become distressingly common across Saskatchewan, where a physician shortage has reached crisis proportions. Last week, a delegation of front-line doctors met with provincial health ministers in Regina, pressing for immediate action to address what they describe as a “system on the verge of collapse.”
Dr. Marlys Misfeldt, who practices in Saskatoon, didn’t mince words during the meeting. “We’re not just losing physicians to other provinces – we’re losing them to completely different careers,” she explained when I spoke with her afterward. “The workload has become unsustainable. I have colleagues seeing 50 patients a day while managing hospital rounds and on-call duties. It’s not safe for patients or providers.”
The Saskatchewan Medical Association reports that the province needs approximately 1,000 more physicians to meet current healthcare demands. Rural areas have been hit particularly hard, with some communities losing their only doctors and residents forced to drive hours for basic medical care.
In Swift Current, the waiting list for a family doctor stretches beyond 4,800 names – in a city of just 18,000 people. Meanwhile, at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital, emergency department visits have increased by 37% over the past two years, largely from patients who have nowhere else to turn.
The human cost of this shortage extends far beyond inconvenience. When I visited the small farming community of Assiniboia last month, I met Jamie Keeler, whose brother died of a heart attack while waiting for emergency services to arrive from the next town over.
“Our hospital had to reduce hours because they couldn’t staff the emergency department,” Keeler explained as we sat at her kitchen table. “Mark might still be alive if we had doctors here. That’s not something our family will ever get over.”
The physician shortage reflects a complex web of challenges. Saskatchewan’s doctors are among the lowest-paid in Western Canada, with compensation rates falling significantly behind Alberta and British Columbia. A Saskatchewan family physician earns approximately $281,000 annually before overhead, compared to $354,000 in neighboring Alberta, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
But compensation is just one factor. Dr. Andrei Krivoshein, who completed his residency in Saskatchewan but left for Ontario last year, told me the decision wasn’t just about money.
“My wife is also a physician, and there were limited options for her specialty in Saskatchewan,” he explained during our phone conversation. “And honestly, the workload expectations were impossible. My colleagues were burning out, spending evenings and weekends just catching up on paperwork. We wanted to practice good medicine, not just survive.”
The situation has prompted strong reactions from healthcare advocates. Saskatchewan Union of Nurses president Tracy Zambory has called the physician shortage “the predictable result of years of underinvestment in healthcare infrastructure and planning.“
During last week’s meeting, Health Minister Everett Hindley acknowledged the severity of the crisis but stopped short of committing to the comprehensive overhaul that physicians demanded. The ministry’s current strategy focuses on international recruitment, with plans to bring 100 new doctors to the province by 2025.
Dr. John Witt, who practices in Prince Albert and attended the ministerial meeting, expressed skepticism about this approach. “Recruitment is important, but retention is the bigger problem,” he explained when I visited his
