It’s not the cure for cancer. Neither is it a supervirus that will kill us all.
Reaction to the reorganization of health care delivery in Alberta announced by Premier Danielle Smith recently has tended towards the latter.
Health care workers, nurses, unions, physicians and opposition politicians have all sounded their sirens about the plan to break the monolithic Alberta Health Services into four new organizations focusing on areas of care.
According to some, the change will spark uncertainty, drive even more physicians away and cause patients to fall through the cracks.
Who knew organizational charts held such power?
NDP leader Rachel Notley’s assertion that the current government created the crisis is particularly unhelpful. It’s a shared legacy of failure that goes back decades, from choking back the number of medical students admitted in the 1990s and the failure of successive governments to reinvest in the years since then.
There’s no question that a reorganization is not going to solve the myriad systemic issues in our health care system – if only it were so easy.
Co-ordination between the four new organizations will be critical to avoid siloing. Avoiding bureaucratic bloat between the four is also a must.
Most important of all is funding – the major issues surrounding recruitment and retention of an adequate number of physicians, nurses and other health care professionals to serve our growing population all revolve around the dollar.
But throwing more money into the gullet of the current system is no guarantee of success, either. A relatively small investment of time and money now in a system that will handle the needed influx of funding could very well be a critical part of the prescription.
The focus on primary health care, for instance, is welcome and necessary. The lack of family physicians, with nearly a million Albertans lacking one, puts stress on the entire system. It forces patients with urgent but not acute care issues into our hospitals – the most expensive form of health care.
The true focus here, of course, will need to be on our rural communities, where family physicians also serve as the backbone of our acute care facilities.
Claiming that this days-old plan will kill health care in Alberta seems a bit like yelling at the anesthesiologist for not having cured the patient. The real work is yet to begin.
Let’s let them get on with it before calling the operation a failure.
