By Amanda Jeffery, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Drayton Valley and District Free Press
Alberta has a healthcare problem, but a two tier system isn’t the answer. That was one of the messages given out at the Friends of Medicare event in Drayton Valley last Friday.
The Friends of Medicare is a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Their mission is to strengthen and protect medicare, focusing on five principles of the Canada Health Act: comprehensive coverage, universality, accessibility, portability, and public administration on a non-profit basis.
Drayton Valley was the sixteenth stop on the tour for the executive director, Chris Gallaway, and Dr. Paul Parks, a doctor with 25 years of experience working in emergency departments. They’ve been travelling the province educating people about what is going on with healthcare. They’ve also been encouraging people to share their own experiences with the current system.
“[We’re] having events that we’re calling an urgent conversation of public healthcare,” says Gallaway. “We believe we really are in an emergent moment.”
He says that at every event there have been municipal leaders in attendance because the issue is one that is affecting everyone in the province. There have been some MLAs in attendance, though, as of March 20, there had not been any from the current governing party.
Gallaway explained that Parks was not being paid to attend the events on the tour; he was volunteering his time in between work shifts at the emergency department in Medicine Hat. As the former head of the Alberta Medical Association for the 2023/24 term, and a member of the Section of Emergency Medicine for the AMA, he had insight into the situation that most would not have.
“This tour is just me; I’m not representing anybody,” says Parks. “I’m just here trying to have a discussion about what’s going on with healthcare.”
During his time actively involved with the AMA, Parks has been speaking to government officials and advocating for better services.
“I actually got to sit at the table really early [with the new government] and had the opportunity to beg the government to steal my good ideas and steal the ideas of my colleagues in surgery and family medicine and anesthesia,” says Parks.
His concern is that the public system, which is understaffed, overworked, and burning out, will see its staff moving to the private clinics. Parks says as it is, there are operating rooms across the province that remain unused for days at a time simply because there aren’t enough nurses, anesthesiologists, or support staff for any surgery to take place.
If the staff that’s left decide to work at a place where they will have regular work hours and be paid more, there will be even less staffing available for crucial procedures in the public health system.
One issue is that private clinics will not be available for acute care or trauma patients. The clinics will each focus on a certain number of procedures that they will always perform; they won’t be set up for anything else.
“If it’s something that could kill you, it cannot be done at a chartered surgical facility,” says Parks.
This means if a person needs open heart surgery or to remove a malignant tumour, they will have to wait for the public system to see to their needs. With fewer staff, the public system will be even slower, and more operating rooms will likely stay empty.
“Right now, throughout the whole province, in our biggest, major hospitals, we don’t have enough ultrasound techs to do our life-saving ultrasounds at ten at night, or two in the morning, or on the weekend, already,” says Parks. “But if we open that floodgate, where do you think those ultrasound techs are going to go?”
Making the situation worse, Parks says the government is no longer listening to its own doctors for advice. Instead, they have hired consultants.
The province has also earmarked $525 million to spend on chartered surgical clinics over the next three years. In comparison, they are planning to invest $91 million over the next three years to expand the capacity of emergency departments and operating rooms in the public system.
Because Parks works in emergency departments, he has been privy to what he calls the “sins of the system.” Those who don’t have a general practitioner, or have surgical complications or cancer care that isn’t working, end up in the emergency department. It acts as a catch-all for those who can’t get the care they need.
Having seen the way the government is refocusing healthcare by breaking it into four pillars, Parks says their attempts to fix public healthcare aren’t working. He calls the pillars silos because there is little communication between each of the four pillars. All four ministers also have more than one CEO under them, which is further complicating matters.
“I think there’s at least 11 different CEOs now; 11 different bureaucracies,” says Parks.
He says he’s spoken to colleagues who have been working in healthcare for 40 years, and they are telling him that the system has never been worse. Many of the frontline workers and their managers are unclear about who they answer to because of the lack of communication and planning from the government.
Parks himself has seen this disorganization at play. He says he’s asked who is in charge of recruitment, and at least two ministers strongly believe it falls under their purview. But there isn’t a Provincial Workforce Plan for healthcare at the moment, so no one is completely certain who is responsible for different services.
“The problem is everywhere, but it’s really [the rural] places that are getting crushed. The changes that are happening are really impacting those communities,” he says.
Though the system isn’t working, Parks says when people do get access to it, they receive some of the best healthcare in the world. He says he decided to speak up because he’s starting to see the breakdown in the system that is causing problems, such as the incident involving the man who died in the emergency department in an Edmonton hospital earlier this year.
“You can’t have a healthy, booming economy and healthy, booming communities if you don’t have a healthy workforce,” says Parks.
Parks says he’s come to see that fixing the healthcare system isn’t something that can be done by one person or organization. He says it will take effort from everyone. In particular, Parks says the public needs to speak up and let their MLAs and their MPs know what they think of the situation.
