EDMONTON — This afternoon, Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, Adriana LaGrange announced that the first phase of an Activity-Based Funding (ABF) model for “high-volume” surgeries has now been implemented in 12 Alberta hospitals.
In April, when the plan was initially announced, Friends of Medicare criticised ABF as a voucher model, promoting quantity over quality, and market competition rather than ensuring we have well-funded public facilities that are best equipped to meet the health care needs of Albertans.
“Every day, and all over the province, we’re hearing from Albertans that they’re suffering while waiting for access to the often life-saving surgeries they need,” said Chris Gallaway, executive director of Friends of Medicare. “Yet instead of bolstering our public health care system, and our publicly administered, publicly delivered surgical services, the Alberta government is undermining our hospitals by requiring them to compete for funding.”
This news follows a series of previous government budgets and announcements that served to undermine our public hospitals, including a refusal to invest in reopening Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital’s shuttered operating rooms, warnings from surgical hospitalists of impending surgical cancellations due to the government’s decision to terminate the hospitalists’ contract at the end of April, and last year’s passing of Bill 55, which opens the doors for private hospital operators in Alberta.
“Our frontline workforce and other experts continue to call for public solutions such as centralized waitlists that could reduce surgical wait times, but those are consistently being ignored. Instead, Alberta has operating rooms sitting empty and unused every single day because this government would rather pursue convoluted schemes to subsidize private profits, even while their failed privatization strategy has already reduced public capacity,” said Gallaway. “What Albertans really need is for our public hospitals to be focused on providing high quality and timely care, which requires them to be funded and staffed properly. Instead this government prioritizes private profits and competition for funding.”
This change to Alberta’s surgical delivery comes while the provincial government is still engrossed in ongoing allegations of serious corruption in surgical procurement, and while most recent government data shows that only 54% of the top five cancer surgeries in Alberta are completed within recommended timelines.
“This government keeps making major promises that improvements are coming for our health care, but these never seem to transpire. In fact, they’ve repeatedly broken their promises to Albertans,” said Gallaway. “The Premier ran last election on a ‘public health care guarantee,’ but since then, they've spent their time in government laying the groundwork to establish two-tier American style health care in Alberta. They have no mandate from Albertans on any of this, yet they still expect us to accept massive changes to our health care system based on trust alone.”
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