By Brad Brown
Citizen Staff

Sun Country Health Region’s direction for the next three years will be partially guided by a planning consultation scheduled for Kipling next week.

The mission: To develop the region’s first-ever three-year strategic plan.

Scheduled for Thursday, the meeting was originally set to go in January before being canceled due to weather.

Sun Country says the meetings (also including a similar one in Estevan on Tuesday) are aimed at following up on information gathered at similar sessions last summer.

“The number one item that has come up in all communities is staffing,” said Sun Country’s regional director Mark Pettitt. “(Things like) the ability to get qualified staff and provide continued services. It’s a challenge at the national level, it’s a challenge in the province, and certainly it’s a challenge in Sun Country.”

Pettitt adds the consultations are open to any and all concerned parties, from a staff member at the local hospital to a member of the local health foundation to a new arrival in the area.

“We’ve actually had pretty good participation from the public,” he said. “We’ve not only invited them to participate in the community sessions but we’ve also set up a questionnaire from the summer sessions in June and what will be discussed at these meetings is the same information that’s on the questionnaire, which is also posted online.

“So if people can’t attend the meeting but want to participate they can always go onto our website (www.suncountry.sk.ca) and provide us with feedback that way.”

Pettitt says he expects the new plan - not their first, he stresses - to be in place before summer. It will encompass the fiscal years 2008-09, 2009-10, and 2010-11.

“This is not our first strategic plan,” he said. “We just found that having a plan without a defined time frame is hard to work with. If you go anything longer than that there’s a lot of change in health care and in government so we just felt that three years was an appropriate way to go.”