Sask. planning to redeploy government workers to help health-care system, looking for 500 volunteers

The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) is developing a plan toredeploypublic-sectoremployees to help deal withstaff shortages during a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

The plan is being put together by Saskatchewan's emergency operations centre and the SHA.

Part of the plan includes takinggovernment employees from other departments and deploying theminto health care to help in non-medical roles such as meal preparation, cleaning and administrative duties.

The purpose of the plan istoaddress a rise in hospital admissions and the number of staff off sick due to COVID-19.

CBC obtained an email distributed to government employeeson Jan. 18that provides more details on what the SHA is looking for.

The email says the SHAwants tofind approximately 500 employees across the province who would be willing to assist if needed.

The SHAis looking for groups of 10 to 20 people in each of the province's 31 health networks and 50 peopleeach in Saskatoon and Regina.

"While support is needed across the entire province, the need is especially great in the North," the email reads.

Any employee volunteering for the duty must be fully vaccinated and able to respond to the SHA's call onthe same day or the day after.

The email notes that the volunteers could be deployed tohospitals, long-term care facilities, testing centres, public health clinics or other public-facing health services.

"While projections indicate a high likelihood of need within the next week or two, individual deployments are anticipated to be short in nature," the email reads, saying the deployments would last one to two weeks.

"Employees being redeployed will be helping in facilities during their regularly scheduled hours of work and during their regular days of work."

When asked for commentthe SHA said they had no further information beyond what was already in this report.

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The provincial emergency operations centre told The Canadian Press that no staff have been redeployed at this time.

The Saskatchewan Party government has reassigned public service employees to support issues related to COVID-19 throughout the pandemic.Their roles haveincluded contact tracing and data entry.

Recent modelling from the government suggests Saskatchewan's COVID-19 hospitalizations will reach record levels by mid-February.