Matt Jones, one of the UCP’s Gang of Four health ministers, actually admits there’s a capacity problem in Alberta’s hospitals!

More than anything, yesterday’s press conference about how the Alberta Government proposes to fix the horrific mess in this province’s hospital Emergency Rooms where patients can wait up to 72 hours to see a doctor appeared to be an effort to look busy until voters can be distracted by something else. 

After all, what else can the United Conservative Party Government do? You can hardly expect them to find a way over the weekend to fix nearly 40 years of bad decisions by a succession of Conservative governments that ignored needed hospital construction while the population of the province literally doubled. 

That nothing will get fixed is especially true when Premier Danielle Smith’s favoured solution to a health care system on the brink of collapse is privatization, private hospitals, and private insurance, none of which are going to do anything except make things worse. 

Even Matt Jones, the member of the Smith Government’s Gang of Four health ministers chosen to lead what was bound to be a difficult news conference, half-heartedly conceded that a “gap in capacity … does exist in Calgary and Edmonton,” without quite pointing a finger at anyone. 

The lack of longer-term beds for patients who arrive at Emergency contributes in turn to the crowding in ERs that has now reach crisis proportions.

“The system requires a long-term capital plan so that these decisions are not reactionary,* they are not political, and they are on time,” said Mr. Jones, whose official title is minister of hospital and surgical health services. “In other words, a hospital-bed tower should be there when the catchment area, the population, the demographics, the acuity, requires it, and we have not had a 50-year capital plan in place. We’re working on it today.”

To lend some credibility in dire circumstances, seemingly, Mr. Jones was flanked by an identity parade of four senior health system officials: Acute Care Alberta Chief Medical Officer Aaron Lowe, ACA interim CEO David Diamond, Alberta Health Services CEO Erin O’Neill, and Patrick Dumelie, CEO of Roman Catholic Church-run Covenant Health.

Obviously, despite the presence of all this executive firepower, nothing is going to change any time soon to alleviate the crisis. Come Monday morning, there will still be a crisis. Next year not much is likely to have changed either. 

Still, to Mr. Jones’s credit, at least he admitted there’s a problem even if he wouldn’t concede it’s a crisis as the province’s physicians have been insisting for weeks. This is the closest thing to an honest answer I can recall hearing from a UCP Cabinet member in months.

It certainly beats blaming the current disastrous state of affairs on seasonal respiratory viruses, which has been the line the government’s been sticking to up to now. 

Always in need of a hard-news lead, most media predictably seized on Mr. Jones’s revelation at the news conference that the government has asked for a judge-led fatality inquiry into the case of Prashant Sreekumar, the Edmonton man who died in the ER waiting room at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Hospital on Dec. 22 after waiting eight hours to see a doctor. That is not a bad decision under the circumstances, although many Albertans are bound to suspect the government hopes that something or someone can be found on which to pin the blame for the tragedy other than UCP indifference and incompetence. 

David Diamond, the senior health bureaucrat the UCP has chosen to run its Acute Care Alberta “pillar” that is taking over the health-care coordination function of Alberta Health Services, insisted at the news conference that whoever is now in charge of the health care system has a “detailed surge capacity plan” to cope with the current flu season. 

“Alberta Health Services,” he explained, “in the previous iteration of the system in Alberta, had a surge plan, and so now, in this new refocus system, we’ve taken that plan, we work with Alberta Health Services, we work with Covenant, we work with Lamont, and so we updated that plan over the course of the fall to ensure an understanding of how our new, refocused acute care system could respond to surge capacity.” 

To take a stab at what Mr. Diamond was trying to say, it sounds as if the new refocused Acute Care Alberta surge capacity plan is basically the same as the old Alberta Health Services surge capacity plan. Which begs the question again: Why did we need to spend a billion dollars to bust up AHS and create a whole new bureaucracy to get the same thing? 

Another question still unanswered after more than an hour and 10,000 words spoken at the news conference was who is actually in charge.

The physicians calling for the declaration of an emergency have claimed it appears nobody is in charge. So, asked Lisa Johnson of The Canadian Press, “Who is directly accountable for managing patient loads across agencies and corridors? Is it Acute Care Alberta? Is it you, Minister? Can you please explain to me the structure of how that works and why there’s confusion there?”

Mr. Jones responded: “There is no one person who runs a $28-billion, complex, integrated health-care system. And as you’ve heard today, Acute Care Alberta, government ministries and departments, and other agencies like Assisted Living Alberta and service providers like AHS and Covenant and Lamont all work together on a daily co-ordinated basis to provide the care to Albertans …”

As former health minister Sarah Hoffman, now the NDP’s health critic, tartly observed at her own news conference later yesterday: “They called one news conference with five people and said nobody’s in charge!”

Ms. Hoffman, the only Alberta health minister to introduce a plan to build a new hospital in Edmonton since 1988 (a plan that was later cancelled by the UCP), noted that for all the government’s announcements and re-announcements about long-term plans to build new facilities, “they’ve put no money towards those projects.”

“We’re seeing a lot of stalling, delaying and promises that years from now there will be more acute-care hospital beds,” she said. “They’re not even in the budget right now.”

As for Mr. Jones’s reluctance to call the crisis a crisis, Ms. Hoffman observed, “doctors, nurses, everyone working in hospitals knows it’s a crisis.”

“I’ve never seen morale lower than it is right now,” she added. “And if you refuse to listen to what they’re saying and acknowledge the fact that they are in crisis, then they have no confidence that you’re going to actually deal with it.”

As for blaming the crisis on respiratory virus season, Ms. Hoffman noted, never forget that this government has played politics for months with vaccine policy. “We’re seeing the consequences of that right now in terms of public health.”

*Mr. Jones, and the reporters who repeatedly used the same word the same way, obviously meant “reactive.”