On Tuesday the Dr. Noble Irwin Regional Healthcare Foundation held their AGM.

The 19th-annual general meeting for the non-profit organization featured Vice President of Integrated Rural Health for the Saskatchewan Health Authority Karen Earnshaw.

Earnshaw said how the foundation has worked together to support health facilities and services in the area is something worth replicating.

"The way that this foundation has worked together and how you actually support multiple services and communities," she said. "I'm going to take that and share that in other communities because it truly is a model that is worth replicating."

Earnshaw said that it's important for foundations like the Dr. Noble Irwin Regional Healthcare Foundation to stay local.

"Fundraising and foundations, we need them to stay local," she said. "We need people to be able to access those foundations; they need to be able to see where their dollars go. If people don't see that their money gets spent and they can't see how it gets spent, then they stop donating. We need to support our foundations locally to be able to continue to get the benefits of donation. If we didn't have those foundations every one of our towns and RM's, we'd all be competing for those very scarce provincial dollars."

Earnshaw said that merging into the one health authority has made the province like a neighbourhood, on how they can share ideas that they weren't able before.

"The single health authority has helped us take down the fences in our big neighbourhood," she said, "You can see what's in people's backyards and there is a lot of really good stuff going on. We just didn't know it. We couldn't share it, and we couldn't make it easily accessible for when we needed that health system."

Earnshaw said that merging into one health authority will continue to be a journey that will take some time as they think about how they can continue  to improve access to their services. 

She said that the ability to learn from other provinces mistakes and successes makes it a little easier.

"We are not the first province to have set off on this journey either for a single health authority," she said. "We can learn from other such as Alberta, what should we copy and what we should we not, and the same things with Nova Scotia and some of the other provinces that have gone before us."

Earnshaw said that they do have concerns from smaller communities about where they sit under the health authority.

"There are lots of worries that in rural communities that we'll lose our identity, we won't necessarily have our local leadership; we'll get consumed by the bigger health authorities," she said. "I think that the idea that there's a lot of thoughtful planning that went into the structure. It's keen that we actually have leaders in our communities who know our communities, who know the community needs, and can elevate to that single point as opposed to having to compete across all of those former regions."

Earnshaw said looking forward they want to focus on improving their day-to-day services.

"We are really good when something terrible happens," she said. "The health system is really designed very well to deal with those sudden things, and we all have a role, and we step into those roles very quickly. We're not always very good at the everyday access to healthcare and that every day supports that people need closer to home. I know that is some of the direction that the panel report gave to us is really focus on those everyday health services, make sure that people have improved access to services closer to home, and those services are easy to navigate."

She says after seeing how smaller communities rely on cities like Swift Current they want to extend their services and improve them for those smaller communities.

"When I saw this facility (the Meadows) and how people come here from other communities, but also the scope and the work that our regional hospital delivers it really is that opportunity to start and think about how do we support our services here. How do those smaller communities that rely on Swift Current, how do we actually start to build those services closer to home and direct people here."