Information attained through Freedom of Information showed the provincial government paid US-based Lean consultants to lead health care workers through a PPE housecleaning at a pandemic supply warehouse in Regina with the explicit goal of donating, recycling or trashing 50 per cent of the pandemic stockpile.
“The Sask. Party’s Lean consultants led health care professionals through a spring cleaning of the pandemic room at the Regina General Hospital with the goal of decreasing stocks by 50 per cent,” NDP Health Critic Vicki Mowat explained.
“They Marie-Kondo’d our pandemic supply warehouse and we want to know how much that approach contributed to leaving us dangerously short of supplies this spring,” Mowat added.
Of the 588,000 items in the room, close to 300,000 were trashed, including 166,000 N-95 masks, records specified.
It was unclear how many of those items were replaced, but Sask. Party officials acknowledged in committee the just-in-time inventory model of health care delivery hasn’t worked for Saskatchewan and risked making the province susceptible, especially during a time whenever supplies can’t be domestically sourced.
With Saskatchewan Health Authority officials apprehensive about scarcities of personal protective gear, the NDP wanted to know whether the Sask. Party’s Lean approach to pandemic stockpiles had impacted Saskatchewan’s insufficiency in PPE equipment.
In Question Period, Mowat called on Premier Moe to ask for forgiveness to frontline healthcare workers for putting them further at risk with the PPE shortages this spring.
“Frontline healthcare workers were raising the alarm about extremely limited supplies of badly needed equipment and were scrambling to ensure the health system was ready to keep people safe. It must have come as a slap in the face for those workers, when the premier denied there was a shortage of supplies on March 16,” Mowat said.
“Will the premier apologize to the health workers he left scrambling because of supply shortages his government created, while he himself was denying those shortages even existed?”
