It’s been nine months since the provincial government surprised Albertans by dropping Alberta Health Services into their lives in place of the regional health authorities, yet the “superboard” has yet to do anything for Albertans beyond cutting services and staff.
It is difficult to argue our new healthcare provider and the minister in charge have done anything of merit to improve the quality of health care. The board has laid waste to senior managerial staff, ripped ambulance services away from municipalities with no guarantees of quality service standards and is now cutting directly from the heart of the health care system — pushing back elective surgeries at one Edmonton hospital, procedures that, despite assurances to the contrary, will directly affect patients suffering from cancer.
We can’t expect the government to pay for every cent of health care coverage; it does have to pick and choose its battles. But since the superboard reared its bureaucratic head and Ron Liepert was appointed minister, there have been no successes to point to, only myriad, bull-headed policies and procedures that, if used in a hospital setting, would leave most patients in worse shape than when they were admitted, if not dead.
The Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton has been ordered to keep this quarter’s costs in line with the last, meaning cutting 15 per cent of elective surgeries. Despite assurances to the contrary, the inevitable became obvious as cancer surgeries started being bumped back one to two weeks further. Now more suggestions of cost savings are coming to light under proposed hospital closures or downgrades throughout rural areas and a hiring freeze of medical specialists in the Capital Health Region. Stephen Duckett, CEO of the board, has reportedly said the province has too many registered nurses in acute care. In the meantime, the board, which was established to deliver health care in a more fiscally efficient fashion, has announced a potential year-end deficit of $500 million.
Laying off 100 managers has impacts on service delivery, but actually ordering a hospital to cut back surgeries hurts those most in need of relief. The board is actually asking the hospital to decide which patient in what condition qualifies for surgery sooner against all the others. Emergency and mandatory procedures will go ahead, but those in pain will become little more than a chart in the eyes of the hospital. Initiatives such as decreasing wait times for knee and hip replacements — a source if pride in the province — will be affected as a result.
Patients shouldn’t have to suffer to justify a bad idea. The Alberta Health Services Board is an ill-conceived bureaucratic monster that prefers to cut first and ask questions later. Its tactics are reminiscent of the Ralph Klein cuts of the early 1990s that devastated health care, cuts from which Alberta hadn’t recovered and now, thanks to Liepert’s bottom-line-at-any-cost, may never.
We can’t morally afford to return to another crippling rounds of health care cuts, regardless of what the government promises the benefit will be in the future. Everyone knows times are difficult because of the economic downturn, but no one suggested patients would have to suffer because of it.
It is too late to go back and dynamite Alberta Health Services and start over. All we can do now is ask the government to wipe out the superboard’s operating deficit as it has done once already. The alternative — forcing the board to eliminate its own deficit through restructuring — will come at the cost of medical staff and patient care, an option too painful to contemplate.
