The Issue

As someone that is married to a health care professional, I can tell you that what many health care professionals want most are the things that would benefit us all - high quality, effective, person-centered care. There are so many ways our province's health care can improve and be more cost effective. We spend about 41% of our budget on health care. That’s over $34 billion dollars. It’s a truly staggering amount. What is more concerning though is that while spending is increasing, outcomes are not getting better. ER wait times are getting worse. People continue waiting in hospitals for continuing care spaces while others literally dying in the waiting rooms because they are overcrowded. 

As an analogy of what is happening, picture our health care system like an airplane. It is currently flying, but it has several warning buttons going off. Low fuel (front line staff), major stress to the air frame (lack of resources), and the flight attendants (administration) are getting mixed messages from the captain and copilot (the Premier and ministers), while the captain assures the passengers (the public) that everything is fine. Without proper planning, the UCP decides to rip the plane apart while in the air to solve the problem. Replacing one wing on one side with an experimental model that doesn’t match the other side. Then they decide that the wing they replaced wasn’t right, so they replace it again with something different. Meanwhile, because they ripped a wing off, passengers are falling out through the tear they caused in the body of the plane. The low fuel? It has been forgotten about because owner of the airline (government) was too busy painting a new decal on the outside to convince everyone that its new and shiny. 

Restructuring our health care system is probably necessary. Facts don’t lie. Many of the best performing health care systems in the world use a hybrid of both public and private care. This is what the UCP is using as the justification for the changes they are making. They have completely ignored the fact that those systems have more doctors and patient beds in them. See the graphic below as an example.

There are also high performing systems that remain public, but they are also structured differently with doctors that are employees of the health system (not private corporations operating a clinic that bills the government) that receive financial incentive to improve patient health (helping patients quit smoking). But restructuring a system requires careful planning, well executed rollouts and full consultation with health care professionals, especially those on the front lines. The UCP has not done any of this. Since the UCP started restructuring AHS, from 2024-2026, we are spending almost $7 billion more on health care. Not because of inflation. These are largely restructuring efforts. Those numbers are in the provincial budget sheets. Do you feel a positive $7 billion difference in the care you receive? Do you see more hospitals actually being built rather than announced? Neither do I.

I have listened to front line health professionals who express frustration about meetings where administration talks about restructuring on a broad level, without explaining how it will affect patients and staff. How many patients could have been seen instead of staff being asked to sit in on a meeting that didn't provide and clarity about how changes will impact the system's functionality? 

Our leader, Peter Guthrie, is a former cabinet minister. He was in the room as these things were being discussed. The UCP was in such a hurry to show that they were taking action on health care that they skipped the planning and went straight to restructuring. And that part about replacing the wing? It is happening a lot. Why? There was no actual plan or consultation.

Resources that were once all under AHS are now divided amongst the new pillars, and are not shared as needed between them; even when they are available and not being used. Patients and residents in our long-term care facilities are paying the price.

On the other side we have the NDP who want to keep everything public. Don’t touch the system, just spend more money. We have been doing that for decades and it isn’t getting better. Something has to change, but it needs to be done right.

I wish I could say we could go back, but AHS has not even been fully dismantled yet and it would waste more money to reverse direction. Instead, we need to:
1. Establish and communicate a complete plan and move forward.
2. Stop picking fights with out health care professionals and sit down and talk with them.
3. Build more hospitals and patient beds where they are needed; not where certain MLAs get elected.
4. We need a plan to recruit more doctors, especially in family medicine

All of this should have happened before we introduced a private stream that uses public beds. Our health care system must not be a political pawn; swinging from one extreme to the other. You deserve better. We need political leaders that will actually listen to our professionals. That’s who I am, and that is what out party is committed to doing.

Solutions

Family Doctors

To recruit more family doctors, it starts at the education level. Being a family doctor does not have the same financial benefits versus educational costs when compared to more specialized fields of study. We need to incentivize students to see that being a family doctor or general practitioner (GP) is a feasible option. In one way or another, we need to bring the cost of their education down.  

We can look at incentivizing this area of study by targeting it specifically and better subsidizing those post-secondary programs. If students can become general practitioners with less debt, the end result will be more appealing.

Alternatively, perhaps we incentivize them to this field through rebates after graduation. For every year they practice general medicine here in Alberta (whether they studied here or not), they receive a grant towards paying down their student debt. This would incent more medical graduates to move here, increasing our number of doctors, while encouraging them to stay and put down roots. More GPs means less strain on our emergency rooms and faster care for everyone. Similar strategies have been used to recruit rural healthcare providers, but they are needed everywhere. That is an investment we should be making all across Alberta.

We also need to work with our clinic operators to find a better pay model that focuses on patient needs. I am sure I am not the only one who goes into a clinic and feels like my pets receive a more attention and care from their veterinarian. Because government has not done the work to increase the number of doctors per 1,000 people, the province restructured clinic fees to incent doctors to see patients faster. 

Once we recruit more doctors, we can find a better fee structure that will actually allow you to be seen like a human that needs care and attention.

Hospitals

These are critical investments. For too long hospitals have been seen as political tools to get politicians re-elected. Have you ever noticed that they only seem to get announced before an election, and then re-announced right after an election? Maybe it happens, maybe not; depending on who got elected to the area. This is wrong, and Sherwood Park knows this narrative all too well.

As a former policy advisor to an infrastructure minister, I was in the room when the minister was receiving an update on the plan for the now scrapped South Edmonton Hospital in 2022. This hospital was a prime example of what I mean when I say our health system is used as a political pawn. It was announced in haste by the NDP before proper planning was completed to incent people to vote for them in the 2019 election. The costs had escalated from $1.8 billion to about $4.7 billion in those few years. However, because a UCP MLA was not elected to the area, it was not seen to be worth the UCP's time to fix the problem and they scrapped it all together.

As the policy advisor to the minister, I took initiative to find a solution that might work in the aggregate for the capital region. We had a proposal from the Stollery for a standalone facility, and phase 2 of the Strathcona County Community Hospital was dropped in 2013 for political reasons (after being promised for political reasons). I requested that the infrastructure department dust off the old blueprints for the Strathcona County building and provide estimates based on current building codes. Between the two projects, we would create about the same number of adult beds, and more beds for children in a standalone Stollery. It gets better. The cost estimate was less than the original $1.8 billion budgeted for the South Edmonton Hospital project. I put that plan together and sold the concept to MLAs, ministers, and the Premier’s Office. 

In 2023’s budget, planning dollars were announced for phase 2 of the Strathcona County Community Hospital. See the link to the budget’s highlight document. Then the NDP won Sherwood Park in the election. What happened to the planning? Crickets. Now that another provincial election is coming and the UCP want to win the seat back, they finally formally announced the planning dollars just over a month ago; more than three years after the dollars were committed. 

You deserve better. The solution I found with the Stollery and the Strathcona County Community Hospital is a demonstration of the problem solving I bring to the table, and the commitment I have to our community and our province. Help me make this and other projects like it happen. We need a government and elected officials that work for Albertans, not themselves.