Letting Stephen Duckett go on Wednesday afternoon was one right move, though not the cure-all the Alberta government and its voters are looking for when it comes to health care. It’s the right first step in accomplishing what Alberta’s opposition parties are arguing for — disbanding Alberta Health Services (AHS) entirely and returning to the previous model of individual health regions.
AHS has accomplished little more than making health care more of a failure in Alberta than it was even before the giant super board was created out of ostensibly nothing in 2008. There was little mention of it until the government actually announced it was happening. There was no consultation and no public mandate. It was a move that took almost everyone outside of the Ed Stelmach government by complete surprise.
The entire idea was unbelievable at the time and still is, especially with repeated public failures becoming the order of the day, some of which can be attributed to Duckett but others that can be placed squarely at the idea of a gigantic bureaucratic monolith being made responsible for the health and well-being of 3.7 million people living in a sprawling province with unique social, financial and health care needs. We were told this would save the province money by ridding us of the enormous salaries of the health region CEOs. Yet it has cost us upwards of $1 billion just in government bailouts alone to simply run AHS with no quantifiable return on investment. Human dignity has been sacrificed at the expense of trimming costs when patients are dying in emergency rooms or the mentally ill are being told they will no longer get “free” hygiene products.
It’s as if the politburo of the former Soviet Union has taken over health care in one of the most conservative provinces in Canada. Granted, universal health care is a socialist pursuit, but to expect one entity to decide how many doctors, nurses, hospital beds, surgeries and tests will be performed in any given year in any given area is akin to outright communism. What suffers? Everything. Emergency room wait times are just the latest public crisis in health care — what about a lack of family physicians, nurses and nurse practitioners? Acute care beds, long-term care beds and spaces for the mentally ill? Hip and join replacements? Prompt imaging results? How is one static, immovable, bureaucrat-heavy body going to fix every single problem health care faces and save us money?
It can’t. Was Duckett a scapegoat? Absolutely, but only because there is little accountability to both the public and the government on the part of AHS. Gene Zwozdesky’s direction to get rid of Duckett proves the lie beneath the assertion that AHS operates at arm’s length of the government. If Zwozdesky and Stelmach have no problems manipulating AHS to serve their own needs, then it stands to reason that an elected cabinet minister should be accountable, not the unelected CEO. Given the proof that model does not work, it makes sense to eliminate it altogether.
Health care requires flexibility, room for innovation and a capacity to respond quickly to immediate problems, none of which an all-encompassing giant like AHS can provide. The larger the entity, the slower the response and the more resistance to change there is. It is better to pass off AHS as simply an experiment gone horribly wrong and wash our hands of it than continue to try and fix something that isn’t accomplishing anything but making headlines. Let’s bring back the regional health authorities, resurrect ministerial accountability and put health care front and centre once and for all.
