A health care service disruption in Boissevain, in late December, didn’t sit too well with community leaders and that led to a meeting almost a month later with health officials.

Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) met with civic leaders and health care providers to talk about what happened and why.

Head of Council Judy Swanson said it was a positive and productive meeting. She said the E-R and acute services were shut down between December 24th and January 4th and council wants to do everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“That triggered it and we also wanted to talk about the future and how we as a community can help or do something for staffing and retention and seeing what we could do working together. The RHA brought a number of staff to explain the temporary closure and how we could avoid it in the future.”

Swanson realizes health care administrators and front line workers don’t have an easy job and she stressed the impact to the community when there is a closure.

“We have a recruitment fund in Boissevain and we may need to access that more. Coming out of the meeting we certainly understand more from the health side and I think PHM heard our concerns about the impact created by a temporary closure.”

Short term Judy Swanson is concerned because of the difficulty in getting agency workers to fill shifts. “We need to mindful of our staff and the hours they’re working and the expectations. The fact agency nurses aren’t able to come makes our nurses have to work that much harder. It is a real fine balancing act and I’m concerned in the short term but not for the long term.”

From the municipality’s perspective Judy Swanson says they could look at things like providing student nurses a place to stay. She adds there will be more meetings with local groups to see what can be done to improve the situation.