Despite their successes in 2017, there's still a lot of work left to do this year for the St. Joseph's Hospital in Estevan. 

Dr. Sawwan (left) joined the St. Joseph's Hospital in April of 2017.

"From our perspective at the St. Joseph's Hospital," explained Executive Director, Greg Hoffart, "some of our accomplishments also remain some of our challenges and that is on the physician requirement front."

"We were fortunate to recruit two exceptional physicians to our community in Dr. Krickan and Dr. Sawwan. Both bring valuable expertise and training to our community. And we're so very fortunate that they chose Estevan start their practice in."

He added that loss of two key physicians was a great challenge that they had to face. 

"Physician recruitment remains our number one challenge in providing the services our community expects and we definitely want to provide our community with. It is a challenge. We are short of physicians at this moment and we have some long term recruiting coming into place but we have a short term situation where we don't have enough physicians. It's interesting in that one of our accomplishments also remains a great challenge."

Hoffart noted that with the acquisition of gynecologist, Dr. Sawwan, the hospital was able to open the Women's Health Clinic. 

"That is something that we have had as a goal for a long time so to reach that goal is a great credit to our staff, our physician, and to the management all participated in the planning to make this a reality, Now, perhaps for the first time ever, we have this women's health clinic that can focus of cervical cancer screening."

Dr. Krickan joined St. Joseph's Hospital in July of 2017.

 He adds that there are many people who work hard to make the hospital run smoothly. 

 "When it comes to St. Joe's, we talk about the new programs from year to year, but we can never forget the enormous work our regular staff do   from year to year from the medical ward to the obstetrics ward, on average we have 300 babies a year, to the dialysis unit to all the support   services. There's a lot of hard work that goes on that doesn't always get mentioned. And there's more work to be done."