Whatever became of those elusive “triage liaison” docs who were supposed to be a Band-Aid on the crisis in Alberta’s big-city Emergency Rooms while the United Conservative Party Government figured out how to solve a problem that’s the result of nearly 40 years of Conservative policy negligence?
They seem to have completely disappeared … without ever appearing!
Readers will recall that late last year, the dangerous gong show in Alberta’s urban Emergency Rooms was approaching a state of near collapse from the annual winter surge of reparatory illness, undoubtedly made worse by the fact the MAGA-influenced UCP had tacitly discouraged Albertans to get vaccinated against respiratory diseases.
The crisis was particularly intense in Edmonton, where there hasn’t been a new hospital built since 1988, a period during which the population of the city more than doubled. Well, the NDP tried, but the UCP tore up the plans on the grounds, presumably, they were ideologically incorrect.
On Dec. 22, just before Christmas, 44-year-old Prashant Sreekumar died inside the Emergency Room at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital after waiting eight hours to see a doctor about chest pains. The Grey Nuns, as it happens, is Edmonton’s newest hospital, the one completed in 1988.
In the short-lived burst of shock and anger that followed the young father’s needless death, Hospital and Surgical Services Minister Matt Jones got up on his hind legs at a news conference on Jan. 15 and promised that all would be well, the Government of Danielle Smith had reams of plans to make things better … eventually.
In the meantime, though, Mr. Jones told reporters at the newser, a new group of Emergency Room docs would help the triage nurses keep things moving in the city’s packed ERs. (Whether these docs would actually be much help was the subject of some debate, but the consensus seems to have been that more bodies helping out on triage wouldn’t be a bad thing even though triage nurses know what they’re doing. The idea had been tried before and didn’t prove effective enough to keep, but political needs must.)
The triage liaison docs would start “immediately,” Mr. Jones – who is one of the UCP’s Gang of Four redundant health ministers – assured the reporters.
But since then, basically, no one’s ever reported seeing a triage liaison physician in an Edmonton ER. They’re almost as elusive as Bigfoot, it would seem.
So what’s with that?
Near the end of January, the CBC reported the triage docs were supposed to start on Feb. 1, but probably wouldn’t. The Alberta Medical Association was still negotiating with the government about pay and working conditions for the category. “I don’t believe that it will start Feb. 1, but hopefully there won’t be a significant delay in getting it started,” AMA President Brian Wirzba told the network.
Whoops, the Band-Aid program would have to wait a bit, The Canadian Press reported on Feb. 2. “I would hope that maybe by the end of this week or next week we would start seeing some of these positions being filled,” Dr. Wirzba, still somewhat optimistic, told the CP.
Now nearly a month has passed and, yesterday, the CBC reported that a government spokesperson had informed them that “the work to recruit for the triage physician liaison role is ongoing.”
Ongoing? Ongoing where? When the CBC’s reporter asked if that meant there actually weren’t any triage liaison doctors, the spokesperson didn’t bother to reply. I think we can take that as confirmation there aren’t any, though, since no one ever seems to have seen one.
Yesterday’s CBC story went on to say that the negotiations to figure out what to pay the new physicians never seem to have happened at all. There’s never even been a meeting, the president of the AMA’s emergency medicine section told the broadcaster.
“The lack of consistent, real engagement has not made me feel confident that it was anything more than politics to announce something that would fix the problem,” said Dr. Warren Thirsk, cutting right to the chase.
Was Mr. Jones, lately the most visible member of the UCP’s Four Horsemen of the Health Care Apocalypse, just gaslighting us about even the Band-Aid solution he trotted out on Jan. 15?
That possibility certainly doesn’t do much to build confidence in the UCP’s promises of big capacity building programs at some indeterminate point in the future, especially in when the activities they’re actually engaged in all point to continued and radical privatization and Americanization of health care.
Or did he just think he could rustle up a few docs in a couple of minutes, give them all a badge with a new title and send them into the fray?
If so, this may just be another case of a conservative government proving it doesn’t have the chops to manage a peanut stand, let alone a massive health care system with a budget of nearly $30 billion and about 140,000 direct and indirect employees.
There’s a charming belief among many voters that if a party doesn’t have the word “conservative” in its name, it can’t manage the multi-billion-dollar business of government. Every day Alberta’s United Conservative Party government proves this is nonsense.
Alberta’s 2026 Budget will be made public in two weeks, on Feb . 26.
Will there be anything about building a new hospital for Edmonton in it? Don’t hold your breath. Finance Minister Nate Horner is already telegraphing tough times, tough choices, and tough noogies for Albertans who need more public services. Especially if they live in a city that consistently votes NDP.