Shortly before 3 a.m. this week I was asked to take someone to the Sturgeon Community Hospital. The problem was severe intestinal pains — possibly food poisoning, possibly influenza. We arrived at the emergency ward by 3:05 a.m. at the latest. After going through triage, there was a wait until 4:25 a.m. when diagnosis and treatment began. During this wait the patient had to make approximately 10 trips to the washroom and was visibly — and within sight of the triage booth — in distress. That did not expedite things. The patient became another victim of an overworked health care facility.
This brought to mind a letter to the Edmonton Journal on Dec. 7 from Georgina Atkin, a nurse whom I have known for a couple of decades. She was weighing in on the insalubrious legacy of recently departed Alberta Health Services (AHS) CEO Stephen Duckett relating to Alberta’s health care system. The next day the Journal featured a letter from Duckett himself, seeking to refute Atkin. This mirrored the squabbles between the generals who had planned the murderous trench warfare campaigns of the First World War and the troops who had to endure them. In one famous incident, a high ranking staff officer visiting the front after the battle was over began crying at the sight of the muddy, blasted landscape, and said, “Good God, did we actually send men to fight in that?” I wished Duckett could have been with me this week as the patient endured what is blandly referred to as “waiting time.” At least as the time passed he could have comforted himself with a tasty snack from the convenient food vending machine.
Four members of the AHS board resigned over government interference with their operation in sacking Duckett. Tony Franceschini said he was quitting because the principle of board independence had been compromised. Looking at his complaint and the reasons given by others resigning, I have the perception of people who delight in exercising authority but do not want accountability. Sorry, but health is a public issue and AHS is a public body with heavy responsibilities to the citizenry. If the people put in charge of it cannot do their job, they ought to expect intervention by elected officials responding to public outrage. They had a hint a year ago when then-health minister Ron Liepert was brought down by outrage over the AHS decision to close mental health beds and charge mental patients for toiletries.
Duckett was brought over to implement Liepert’s intensification of the inept re-designing of Alberta’s health care system, which began over a decade and a half ago under Premier Ralph Klein. That butchery began in 1994 through Klein sidekick Shirley McClellan, who nearly four years ago resigned her seat in the legislature on the same day as Klein. In 1994 I was often in Calgary because of my aging father’s health problems. Once, a day or two after his release from one hospital following an operation, he was taken to another hospital emergency ward by ambulance, there to wait for eight hours until it was decided to admit a frail and obviously ill man. This week the person I took to the Sturgeon did not require admission and got out earlier.
As I left the hospital I saw Ralph Klein’s front-page picture beaming from an Edmonton Sun vending box, with a banner proclaiming his current health issues. Our hospital system is his legacy.
St. Albert resident David Haas often comments on public issues.
