Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro speaks at a Monday news conference after the release of a review of health care in this province. Photo taken from a video on the Your Alberta Facebook page.

By Curtis Galbraith

Health

Review of health care released, province rejects idea of closing hospitals

Feb 3, 2020 | 5:16 PM

The Alberta government says a review of health care done by Ernst & Young LLP has come up with 57 recommendations on system improvements and another 72 ways to save money.

The province adds in a release that potential long-term savings range from $1.5-billion to $1.9-billion per year.

The report says that there are 83 small or medium-sized hospitals in Alberta, 36 of which could be reconfigured or have fewer beds. Five others could be closed. Where these are located is not stated in the report.

Health Minister Tyler Shandro says closures are not going to happen.

“We’re going to encourage AHS to look at the reconfiguration and whatever they can do to make sure all of our sites throughout the province are meeting the threshold of viability.”

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The province also rejected the notion of consolidating trauma care centres. There was a recommendation to merge two such places in Edmonton into one.

Some of the other recommendations include contracting out services like food and laundry to private businesses and having private clinics do more surgeries that would be paid for out of public money, include new work and pay rules for nurses and doctors, and working with unions on collective bargaining agreement provisions that cost money but do not provide benefits to patients.

Alberta Health Services President and CEO Dr. Verna Yiu says reconfiguration is not a new idea, adding it has worked in the Red Deer area.

“Red Deer (Regional) Hospital (Centre) was struggling with not having enough operating room time. There was a lot of surgical need, so they decided within the Central Zone to actually spread out surgical services to some of the smaller sites that didn’t have the same OR strains and had more capacity. They spread out, I would say, thousands of different surgeries to surrounding communities around Red Deer. ”

Shandro says it is up to Alberta Health Services to decide what goes where.

“This report, I think, is suggesting that AHS should go and make sure that all 83 of these community sites are meeting, and all of our hospitals throughout the system, are meeting the threshold of viability, and there’s a lot of information for them to able to look at and ensure that that is happening.”

AHS now has until May 13 to come up with an implementation plan.

Shandro says the government will have a better idea of savings when that plan is finished.

“That’s going ot be a big part of it, for us to be able to now work with AHS to determine what type of potential savings could be done through any of these opportunities through the implementation plan.”

Dr. Yiu says AHS wants to make sure that Albertans get the “most appropriate care, no matter where they are.”

“We know for sure that appropriateness is one of the major focus that we will need to go towards into the future, to ensure that our health care is more sustainable.”

The full 101-page report can be found here.

– with files from The Canadian Press