It turns out not everything about yesterday’s announcement that the United Conservative Government is “making progress refocusing the health care system” was illogical and misleading.
One tidbit about the chaotic restructuring, the point of which has never been coherently explained by any official spokesperson, is that the government is replacing Alberta Health Services’ five zones with seven “corridors.”
“Hold Page One!” you may shout sarcastically, but at least this unintentionally acknowledges that under the UCP “hallway medicine” has become the new normal in Alberta’s disintegrating health care system.
Other than that, though, regardless of the cheerful words of the government’s press release about how dismantling AHS will “refocus the health care system to give Albertans the health care system they need,” literally almost everything they are doing is moving the system in the opposite direction.
The few reporters who showed up for the government’s news conference had to dig deep for something that met the traditional definition of news – which, you know, requires their stories to be about something new.
About the best they could do was that the massive restructuring – which is costing a fortune and disrupting an already battered system with no meaningful promise of better future performance – is now months behind schedule.
Health Minister Adrianna LaGrange’s explanation for the delay in setting up a new acute care agency was that “refocusing the health care system is a complex process that needs to be done right.”
Well, I suppose for the reporters it was either that or lead with the fact the new Alberta acute care agency will be called Acute Care Alberta and has a cute new logo, which Health Minister Adriana LaGrange spent a lot of time explaining, reading, by the sound of it, straight from the ad agency’s jargon-filled spiel.
Hey, it’ll “increase awareness so we can all better understand when to use acute care services”! As University of Calgary health law professor Lorian Hardcastle observed in a tweet thread, the best way to do that is actually to make sure everyone has a family doctor.
What Acute Care Alberta is supposed to achieve has never been adequately explained – and wasn’t again yesterday by Ms. LaGrange. What’s clear between the lines is that it will add another layer of bureaucracy over Alberta Health Services, which will continue to require a significant number of managers to run.
Perhaps Chris Eagle, the former AHS president brought back from the political crypt to act as “special external advisor” to Acute Care Alberta, can explain it one of these days – although he stood solemnly on Ms. LaGrange’s left throughout yesterday’s performance without uttering a word that anyone noticed. Maybe he was worried someone would ask him why he quit halfway through his five-year contract back in 2013.
According to the press release, Acute Care Alberta will become a legal entity early next year and begin operating, whatever that means in this context, next spring.
Also at the newser, standing similarly silently to Ms. LaGrange’s right although looking more cheerful about it, was Primary Care Alberta CEO Kim Simmonds.
Unlike Acute Care Alberta, Primary Care Alberta – which also got a cute new heart-shaped logo – has a real CEO and actually exists as a legal entity. According to the press release, Primary Care Alberta is now “operational.”
Whether that means it actually exists in any more tangible form is not quite so clear. To date, while it has a CEO, it seems to have no offices and very few people know where Dr. Simmonds works. Perhaps she’s still using her old digs at Alberta Health (as the Alberta Heath Department is confusingly branded), where she used to be an assistant deputy minister.
Dr. Simmonds is a PhD epidemiologist, which presumably explains why she’s not the CEO of Acute Care Alberta – since it’s pretty clear Premier Smith wouldn’t tolerate anyone in that job who believes in epidemics. Indeed, part of the reason for this entire gong show is widely understood to be Ms. Smith’s revenge on AHS for its public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Does Primary Care Alberta have any employees? Not many now, by all accounts. And who is paying those that it has? AHS, presumably.
As for the new continuing care agency – what do you want to bet it’s called Continuing Care Alberta and has its own cute logo? – it will be run out of the Ministry of Seniors, Community and Social Services, making what it’s up to even more opaque and confusing. Indeed, from there it’ll hardly even be part of the health care system.
Ms. LaGrange told reporters yesterday that about 500 management positions have been eliminated at AHS – which, remember, is still an organization with close to 100,000 employees, so just to operate it would require many more managers than that. But how many managers will the other four “pillars” of health care UCP style eventually have? More than 500, I would bet.
Well, we’ll have to wait to see. In the meantime, the government continues to insist what it is creating is “four fully integrated provincial health agencies.”
This begs the obvious question: If they were fully integrated in AHS before, why did they have to be created. Or, to put this another way, who benefits from this restructuring? It’s certainly not Albertans.
As Ms. Hardcastle noted in her tweet thread, the UCP has presented no evidence that its new model will improve access. The opposite is more likely.
The whole health care refocusing project has the feel of a bureaucratic Potemkin Village created to fool voters into thinking one thing is happening while in reality something quite different is going on. To wit, a chaotic restructuring intended to make it easier to privatize huge hunks of public health care – as is already happening with the so-called Recovery Alberta agency, which now does have about 10,000 employees, all still paid by their former employer, AHS.
As for the Opposition NDP, it had little to say. “People keep telling me they want a doctor and shorter wait times for specialists,” Health Critic Sarah Hoffman said on a couple of social media platforms, “but the UCP just announced a new logo and CEO.”
This is clever, but a more serious critique is essential.
UCP has plan to lower auto insurance cost by raising it
The CBC has revealed the UCP’s plan to lower Albertans’ auto insurance premiums, which are the highest in the land.
Turns out they’ll lift the cap on insurance rates and take away the right of Albertans who are injured to sue for damages.
Notwithstanding the many words devoted to the subject, that’s all you actually need to know.
We’ll see the press release later this week.
All this restructuring nonsense at AHS has only two purposes:
1. To enrich UCP insiders.
2. To hasten the destruction of publicly funded healthcare as a pretext to privatization.
The UCP were claiming that AHS was badly run and inefficient. It had issues, but they pale in comparison to what this new system will be like. It’s going to get worse.
Raising auto insurance costs even more, despite the fact that Alberta already has the highest costs for auto insurance in Canada. The UCP are a very bad government.
About the best they could do was “that the that the” massive restructuring –
Looks like a double phrase?
OA: Thanks. Fixed. D
As someone who no longer has a family doctor and is searching for a new one, I have a question I’d like answered at the next news conference involving the Health Minister. Why are almost all the doctors taking new patients in the Calgary region recent arrivals from Nigeria? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work to retain the Canadian trained physicians who are established in their practice than to bring in new doctors from a country with one of the worst health care systems in the world? Am I missing something?
Noise and chaos generated by serious people? Really?
A government that sets out to destroy governance is no government at all! Baffle gab and horse hockey! Burn our money and pick fights? Sounds fairly accurate!
There is a distinct odour emanating from our legislature! The fine fragrance of feedlot!
Please do an article on “how to fact check Alberta government press releases.” Alternatively a new blog on “how to perform surgery with no medical training”. There I was thinking our southern neighbours were in trouble in their new head of health care. Stay well Alberta!
Gail: Contrary to a popular misconception, I am not an eye surgeon. Let me think about the other idea, though. It has merit. My long out-of-print, pre-Internet, 1995 cult-classic on public relations, A Poke in the Public Eye, explained how to critically read a government press release. DJC
Let’s do the time warp again. 30 or 40 years ago Alberta Health Care had something called organizational silos in their structure. Around about 1994? AHS was created and with it a mission type structure-no silos. It served reasonably well when given stable adequate finance, which was almost never. Today these corridors sound just like the silos of old, except less phallic. Perhaps David you have a comment on the parallels between the structure of 30 years ago and this new one? The Used Car Party does seem to love dragging Albertans back to a supposedly gold hued past.
UCP has plan to lower auto insurance cost by raising it
Rumor has it that Alberta will offer insurance from a company in Nigeria to help reduce rates!
TB
The ongoing obfuscation by Sleepy LaGrange by highlights the UCP are not even capable of running a credible grift without it flying off the rails.
CONs have this alarming tendency to f*ck themselves up while trying to f*ck everyone else up. They’re like a gang of crooks and liars who can’t keep a straight face. It’s like they want to be caught.
Who’s gonna buy the UCP’s healthcare bible, much less its textbook on how to do it?
Smith’s well paid and sometimes competent communications staff must have been working overtime to come up with a catchy new term term for the again reorganized health care zones or regions. To be fair, it is hard to come up with something new but different when the best terms have already been used. But the pressure must have been on them to come up with something good from their boss who so values appearance over substance.
This is the sort of situation that leads people to come up with something like corridors. Well I guess that more accurately describes our system of hallway medicine than they probably intended. Whether they quite realize it or not yet, it is likely corridors will become the butt of many dark humour jokes by anyone who has to endure working in or dealing with our dysfunctional health care system.
So I suppose this will come to be seen as a communications fail. Yes you can put lipstick on a pig, but maybe hot pink is not the best to accentuate things.
I suppose other than that, it is hard to critique the nice but bland logos for the new health organizations. Other than the already stated, Smith and the UCP continued to fiddle while Alberta health care crumbles.
So welcome to Alberta, now to be known as home of corridors of hallway health care.
Now that the health care system is divided into saleable sections, perhaps that is why smith is going to washington. She’ll be able to sell the part which handles the surgeries, etc. but the other parts no one will be that interested in. Its the surgeries which make the money.
During COVID a friend ran into an old school friend who was back in town, to their surprise, given the friend lived and worked in Texas. Well they had closed the hospital she worked at because there were no surgeries being preformed so no money to be made so the hospital was closed. That ought to be fun if that is what happens in Alberta.
Albertans voted for this so they will have to learn to live with it and die because of it.
And south of the border they’re putting Dr. Oz in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. Crazy! Why would they do this? Don’t they realize this will diminish public health care? Oh, perhaps they do know exactly what they’re doing.
Perhaps, they can’t deport citizens so if they want to lower the number of Americans cut their access to health care. In 1975 the U.S.A.’s population was approx. 219,000,000. If the maga crowd wants to turn back the clock to what they think were their glory years I’ve always thought they would have to reduce their population by at least a 100,000,000
That would certainly explain Trump’s response to COVID-19. DJC
I think this might be a metaphor for what the UCP is doing to healthcare: on the Alberta Health ministry’s website the logos are also laid out, with the Primary Care’s logo (stethescope) the one used for Acute Care at the news conference (stethescope in the photo above). And, it is still on their website as such five days later. Yup, not surprising they are only now realizing that healthcare is complex.
LaGrange is the least photogenic person on the planet but this particular pic is the best meaning worst.
She’s the opposite of Dorian Gray. Every bit of evil she does shows on her face. She doesn’t meet the eye ever. Severely damaged lying person.
To Mr hippie. St. Albert has assistants in emerg that’s what it says on the drs sheet. Told by assistant don’t think this will be printed to put polysporin on my husbands penis to prevent urinary imfection. This is the gods truth Bet this will not appear on this site
Gail: Bet again. This site is moderated without AI. Sorry about your hubby’s junk. DJC