Cornerstone Planning Group originally posted on its website in February that the Lloydminster Health Service Needs Assessment contained 13 future-state recommendations. That page was later removed.
This is the final chapter.
BorderPulse has been working from an unredacted 261-page copy of the document the provinces refused to provide the public, meticulously examining its findings to bring those recommendations to light.
On June 25, 2026, the governments of Saskatchewan and Alberta released a four-page summary of the Lloydminster Health Service Needs Assessment and told the public that “overall, service levels are being met similar to other communities of this size.”
That sentence closes the summary. It is the government’s verdict on a $262,260 document that recommends a 132 per cent increase in mental health staffing, a five-bed intensive care unit that does not exist, 10 more funded hospital beds, 29 additional operating room hours per week, a crisis response team the city does not have, and newborn transfer protocols to reduce transfers the assessment calls avoidable.
This is what two governments did not want you to read.
The following is drawn directly from Appendix 4.7 of the Lloydminster Health Service Needs Assessment, Final, December 2025 – the document’s own summary of future state directions for consideration, in the consultants’ own words.
Emergency Department
The assessment calls for the introduction of Physician Assistants to support peak-hour throughput, a dedicated Mental Health Nurse embedded in the emergency department, and a Mental Health Short Stay Unit within the ED footprint.
Lloydminster’s emergency department handles approximately 23,000 visits a year with single-physician coverage for 14 treatment spaces. One in six patients left without seeing a doctor in 2024-25. Average wait time is 5.8 hours. The peer median at comparable Saskatchewan hospitals is 2.6 hours.
The fast-track zone exists. It is usually unstaffed.
Primary Care
The assessment calls for a Primary Access Clinic linked to primary care to provide next-day appointments for diverted low-acuity patients, extended primary care hours, streamlined administrative processes for physicians holding dual Alberta-Saskatchewan licences, and virtual allied health services.
Lloydminster runs two primary care systems. They do not coordinate with each other. The patient attachment rate on the Saskatchewan side is 40 per cent. Six in 10 patients on that side of the city do not have a regular provider.
Surgical Services
The assessment calls for expanding OR capacity equivalent to an additional 29 hours per week to meet projected demand of approximately 5,400 annual procedures by 2040, including the introduction of weekend surgical services and the recruitment of additional surgical specialists and operating room nurses.
The surgical waitlist grew from approximately 500 patients in 2023 to more than 1,100 by the end of 2024-25. The hospital does not perform scheduled surgeries on weekends. Patients with orthopedic trauma admitted on Friday wait in hospital beds until Monday.
Critical Care
The assessment calls for developing a five-bed regional-level ICU led by internal medicine physicians, with emergency department nurses upskilled into ICU roles and allied health services available seven days a week.
Lloydminster Hospital once had an ICU. Staffing challenges led to its closure. The replacement Special Care Unit cannot deliver sustained ventilation or manage complex cases over longer periods. Twenty-nine patients were transferred for critical care in five months of 2025 – by air ambulance, weather permitting.
Saskatchewan’s provincial legislation requires regional hospitals to provide ICU capacity. Lloydminster does not meet that standard. No decision on funding an ICU has been finalized.
Inpatient Care
The assessment calls for increasing funded bed capacity from 66 to 76, adding beds for medicine, surgery, mental health, the recommended ICU, and obstetrics and pediatrics.
The hospital runs at 85 per cent occupancy on an average day. On peak days, every funded bed is in use. Roughly eight beds daily are occupied by patients who do not need acute care but have nowhere else to go. The 2040 projection requires 10 more beds than the hospital currently has.
Maternity and Newborn Care
The assessment calls for prioritizing the reduction of avoidable newborn transfers by ensuring adequate and stable nursing staffing levels, and for enhanced interprovincial coordination with clearly defined referral pathways and transport protocols.
Lloydminster Hospital delivers approximately 800 babies a year. Some of those newborns are transferred to Saskatoon or Edmonton not because they need a higher level of care, but because the staff are not there to keep them.
The 2013 health assessment commissioned by the same two governments flagged maternity services as a priority. Twelve years later, the transfers are still happening.
Continuing Care
The assessment calls for establishing a Transitional Care Unit close to Lloydminster, but not within the hospital, to relieve Alternate Level of Care pressures, and for enhanced discharge planning, standardized assessment tools, and seven-day allied health coverage.
The population aged 75 and older in the Core Service Area will nearly double by 2040. There is no Transitional Care Unit. Medically stable patients occupy acute care beds because there is nowhere else for them to go. Patients on the Alberta side and patients on the Saskatchewan side face different eligibility rules for discharge into the same continuing care system.
Home Care
The assessment calls for adjusting staffing and resourcing levels to reflect the administrative demands of a bi-provincial system, and for aligning a portion of home care teams with acute care services to streamline discharge and reduce hospital length of stay.
Home care staff in Lloydminster manage clients from two provinces under two sets of policies, two sets of documentation requirements, and two sets of eligibility criteria. The administrative workload is not reflected in how the system is resourced.
Public Health
The assessment calls for adjusting staffing levels to reflect the additional administrative workload of the bi-provincial system, and for expanding public health’s role in well-baby visits, postpartum home visiting, parenting programs, immunization follow-up, and early childhood health promotion.
The assessment excluded planning for land-based Indigenous communities, noting separate planning processes were underway in parallel. The extended service area is up to 21 per cent Indigenous. That planning gap is not in the four-page summary.
Emergency and Inpatient Mental Health
The assessment calls for establishing a Mental Health and Substance Use Short Stay Unit to provide a secure, dedicated environment for patients in crisis, 24-hour dedicated psychiatric nursing in the emergency department, and targeted upskilling of existing staff.
There are no psychiatric beds at Lloydminster Hospital. There never have been. Everyone requiring psychiatric admission is transferred out of the community, most often to North Battleford or Ponoka. One thousand mental health and addictions presentations arrive at the emergency department annually. There is no dedicated space to handle them.
Community Mental Health
The assessment calls for creating a Police and Crisis Team to reduce reliance on the emergency department, and for increasing community mental health staffing by approximately 132 per cent, with an additional 10 per cent adjustment for cross-border administrative demands.
There is no formal crisis response team in Lloydminster. There is no after-hours clinical community support. Local police are the default first responders for people in acute mental health crisis. The city is spending $3 million a year across 11 departments on social disorder response. It launched a $325,000 enforcement and navigation unit in May 2026 because the provinces have not acted.
Medical Imaging
The assessment calls for a long-term strategy to maintain CT scanner reliability, ensure 24-hour access to X-ray and fluoroscopy, explore sustainable MRI capacity, and establish a dedicated coordination function across Alberta and Saskatchewan to improve referrals and data sharing.
Lloydminster Hospital relies on a single CT scanner. When it goes down, patients are diverted under informal arrangements with no standardized protocols. CT scans performed at Lloydminster Hospital are not automatically uploaded into Alberta’s NetCare system. Lab results from the Alberta Precision Laboratories site are not accessible through Saskatchewan’s electronic health records.
Laboratory and Pharmacy
The assessment calls for shifting outpatient diagnostic demand into community-based facilities, establishing sustainable staffing pipelines, strengthening bi-provincial information-sharing processes, expanding pharmacist involvement in clinical care, and redesigning space to integrate pharmacy staff with clinical teams.
The hospital laboratory was not designed to function as a community outpatient collection site. It has become one because two provincial health record systems cannot talk to each other. Patients get duplicate tests because one province cannot see what the other province has already done.
Two governments paid $262,260 for this document. They held more than 35 engagement sessions with the community it describes. They received it in December 2025. They released four pages. They denied the rest to a journalist on the same day they issued a press release about it. They told a television station the document contained confidential information. It does not.
When asked to comment throughout this series, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health, responding on behalf of both provinces, said the findings would be used to inform future planning. It cited a provincial surgical program. It referenced a mental health action plan. It pointed to 50 actions in a Patients First Health Care Plan. It said patients are at the heart of every decision.
It did not commit to an ICU. It did not commit to a PACT team. It did not commit to a Transitional Care Unit. It did not commit to weekend surgeries. It did not address the 132 per cent mental health staffing shortfall. It did not address the avoidable newborn transfers. It did not address the fact that Lloydminster Hospital does not meet Saskatchewan’s legal standard for a regional hospital.
On the lapsed funding agreement, the government confirmed it. “Alberta and Saskatchewan continue to work and offer services in good faith under the expired Services Agreement and are committed to renewing the agreement,” said Dale Hunter, Senior Media Relations Consultant with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health. No timeline for renewal was provided.
The document says what this community needs. It has been saying it, in various forms, since at least 2013.
“Overall, service levels are being met similar to other communities of this size.”
That is the government’s closing line on 261 pages of evidence to the contrary.
This series is done. The document is not going away.
The full series can be found here: Lloydminster Health Needs Assessment: Investigation
