Executive Director of Friends of Medicare, Chris Gallaway, speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about the need for increased health care funding.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michael Higgins: Let’s start on the big dollars for education infrastructure. How much hope does this give you where heightened investment in health care is concerned?
Chris Gallaway: There’s no doubt we need investment in education and health care for a booming population, that’s been true for many years.
So watching the Premier’s address where she announced this is actually quite frustrating because she spent half of her time looking for others to blame for what’s happening rather than taking responsibility for her own government’s record and decisions in terms of public services.
The premier blamed the prime minister and the carbon tax and school boards and municipalities and that very unfortunate rant about immigration, rather than owning her own government’s decisions.
Those decisions were to not build infrastructure, to cancel projects, while at the same time running a campaign asking folks to move to Alberta, and now they’re acting surprised when folks have moved here.
Our population has grown and that’s added strain to our public services like health and education.
It’s totally predictable and what’s happening now is totally reactionary.
MH: So how much of a door might this this open? The government is responding to rapid growth in population and boosting the education sector. Should the same happen with health care?
CG: We would hope so. We saw documents leaked last year around the provincial budget showing that we were thousands of beds short around the province, including hundreds in Edmonton. Yet in that provincial budget just a few months ago, they canceled the south Edmonton hospital and they delayed other infrastructure projects.
They aren’t funding the new beds and the staff we need to run those services. Hopefully they’ll change course now that they’ve admitted it’s an issue in education to do the same in health care, but right now they seem more concerned with the restructuring project, their chaos that they’re creating, than actually looking at the health care workforce and the infrastructure and the beds we need to serve a growing population.
MH: Is there an expectation, though, that some big dollars will be needed regardless, where the overhaul of health care is concerned?
CG: Absolutely. They’re spending a lot on this overhaul. They’re now doing a review to make things more seamless, so they say.
We’ve seen a lot of money spent on privatization schemes, on setting up new agencies, we haven’t seen money spent on beds for Albertans.
We’re trailing the country in the number of beds and we haven’t seen an increase in spending for staff to actually work in our facilities, on family doctors, on nurses and other health care professionals.
We’re not seeing investment in what is needed.
We’re seeing a lot of distraction in terms of restructuring, carving things up, and further fragmenting the system.
That’s not what we need to see so hopefully, as they talk about education infrastructure, they’ll also start talking about health care infrastructure and staffing.
MH: This week the government announced what it’s calling “The Seamless Patient Experience” review. Apparently it’s a means of ensuring delivery of care is a priority through the government’s health system overhaul. It’s to be led by Dr Lyle Oberg. What are your expectations of this review process?
CG: This is something that was also totally predictable.
When the announcement of restructuring and splitting up AHS into four sectors and then further contracting out and privatizing all came up, ourselves, and many other healthcare experts said, ‘you’re going to make the patient experiences worse by fragmenting the system, having all these different entities involved in patient care’.
Who will be responsible? How will patients navigate that?
This is the wrong path. Now we’re kind of seeing the government admit that there’s issues with this approach.
I don’t think appointing a former conservative cabinet minister is going to get us anything other than what the government already wants to hear.
So our expectations of that review are pretty low. It’s a trend we’re seeing now where former conservatives are leading all sorts of parts of our health care, like the Health Quality Council, this review and so on.
MH: To free up Dr. Lyle Oberg for this new role, he’s being replaced by Angela Fong, the newly appointed chair of Alberta Health Services Board. What do you make of the change in that AHS leadership?
CG: It’s concerning to see constant changes in leadership.
Since the UCP has been elected they have fired boards, they’ve put in administrators, they’ve put in new boards.
Now we’ve moved the board chair over to a new role, all at the same time as they’re dismantling Alberta Health Services into multiple entities throughout this fall.
It’s just creating more chaos, more lack of leadership.
Who’s really in charge? We hear constantly from frontline health care workers who say “what’s really happening?”
No one seems to know as this restructuring continues, and now again, we’ve shuffled folks at the top.
MH: Alberta doctors signaling this week their patience has come to an end where a compensation model and a plan to stabilize acute care are concerned.
They’re saying the premier had promised implementation of the pay deal by September.
What do you take away from the state of this dialogue and the degree of progress being made here?
CG: It’s absolutely illogical. The doctors have been raising the SOS, red alert, urgent situation since last fall.
The government committed to act, committed to get a new compensation model in place for this fall, they’ve now broken that promise for simply no reason.
All they need to do at this point is sign the deal, fund it, and work to stabilize primary care. Instead, they’re sitting on their hands, doing nothing as doctors are telling us they’re going to leave.
AMA put out startling numbers around their conference, saying that over half of Alberta doctors are looking at closing their practice, and many of them are already taking steps to do so. This is an urgent situation, the government should be active.
Albertans want access to family doctors to primary care. They expect our government to act, not sit around and wait for it to get worse.