A running record of BorderPulse’s investigation into the Lloydminster Health Service Needs Assessment, what’s been published, what’s coming, and why it matters.
Two governments paid $262,260 for a detailed picture of health care in Lloydminster. They received it in December 2025. They released four pages.
BorderPulse is publishing the rest.
In late June, BorderPulse began a 13-part investigative series into the Lloydminster Health Service Needs Assessment, a 261-page document commissioned jointly by Saskatchewan and Alberta, produced by Cornerstone Planning Group and AnalysisWorks, and withheld from public access on the same day the government issued a press release summarizing its findings.
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Health denied BorderPulse’s freedom of information request for the full document on June 25, citing four exemptions under provincial law. It explained none of them. BorderPulse filed a formal appeal with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner the following day.
That appeal is ongoing. The series continues regardless.
The assessment covers 13 service areas across Lloydminster’s bi-provincial health system. It draws on more than 35 engagement sessions with residents, health care workers and administrators across a catchment area stretching 150 kilometres from Lloydminster, serving approximately 217,000 people.
Those residents participated in building this document. They were not permitted to see what it found.
What we have published
Story 1 examined how a government can summarize a document for the public and deny that same document to a journalist on the same day. The Saskatchewan Ministry of Health cited four exemptions under provincial freedom of information law. It explained none of them.
Story 2 examined who the assessment actually covers — a catchment area larger than most residents realize, with populations and gaps the four-page public summary did not mention. Approximately 217,000 people depend on one hospital. The government’s public summary did not explain what the assessment found about the gaps in serving them.
Story 3 examined why some newborns are leaving Lloydminster Hospital for reasons that have nothing to do with their medical condition. The assessment used a specific word for those transfers: avoidable. It recommended stable nursing staffing and clearly defined interprovincial transfer protocols. Neither recommendation appeared in the four-page summary.
Story 4 examined what happens when someone in Lloydminster experiences a mental health crisis after business hours. There is no crisis response team. There is no dedicated psychiatric space at the hospital. Community mental health staffing sits at less than half the benchmark for comparable communities. The assessment recommends a 132 per cent increase in staffing. That recommendation did not appear in the four-page summary either.
What is coming
Running through every story is a thread that begins not in 2025, but in 2013.
Twelve years ago, a different set of consultants produced a different health assessment for the same two governments covering the same city. That document was released in full. It identified Lloydminster as “underserved when compared to provincial average health services capacity.” It called interprovincial coordination failures “major inhibitors to cost-effective service delivery.” It called for immediate action across mental health, surgical services, critical care, and primary care.
The 2025 assessment found the same problems. In several areas, they are worse.
Coming in the days ahead: why Lloydminster still does not have a regional intensive care unit, and what Saskatchewan law says about that. How many inpatient beds the hospital needs and how far short it falls. What the assessment found inside the emergency department. What happened to primary care. What is happening to elder care. Why the dual-jurisdiction system creates barriers no other community in Canada faces. What twelve years of inaction looks like when you put both assessments side by side. And what the government’s own consultants wrote in the final two pages of a document two provinces tried to make disappear.
This is not a story about what might go wrong with health care in Lloydminster.
It is a story about what has already gone wrong, who knew, and what they did about it.
The full series runs daily, weekdays, through mid-July at borderpulse.ca. This page will be updated as each story publishes.
The full series can be found – Lloydminster Health Needs Assessment: Investigation – The Border Pulse
