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Last Updated: Jul 2nd, 2008 - 20:21:03
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Creating a single health governance board is the first paving stone in the road to privatization and eventually perdition, critics charged Thursday in the hours following the province’s announcement.
The Alberta Liberals accused the Conservatives of doing surgery without checking the patient’s chart when they dissolved the nine regional health-care boards. Friends of Medicare spokesman Gordon Campbell called it managing medicare by stealth.
“It certainly centralizes power and with that kind of power, is it going to move more and more towards privatization with absolutely no chance for the average person on the street to be even able to speak against it?” said Lethbridge East MLA Bridget Pastoor. “Everybody is going to be worried about their jobs but more than anything, this (move amounts to) rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
“There are certainly areas of medicine that can better be served by central control, pharmaceuticals for example,” Campbell said. “In general however, health care is not a commodity best served by the marketplace or governed by those chosen from the marketplace.”
The new Alberta Health Services Board will be responsible for the delivery of health services for the entire province. Ken Hughes, president of an insurance brokerage and former MP for Macleod, will become chairman of the board. Interim CEO is Charlotte Robb, a former CEO. Chinook Health chairman Jack Ady was appointed to the six-member interim board. The interim board will serve for a term that expires March 31, 2009.
The announcement marks a sea of change for the province but precisely how one central board can address regional concerns better than a local board remains in question.
Ady said the new board is responsible to provide health-care services across the province, without marginalizing anyone. People in Chinook Health might even realize some benefit.
“It isn’t as though we’ve always had an easy road even with a board. We’ve had difficulty getting enough funding to balance. On most annual increases we struggle,” Ady said. “We have done a lot of things to address it but again, two years in succession we received the lowest amount of increase of any region in the province. So maybe things will be better for us instead of not so good.”
In the big picture, Ady said he believes Health Minister Ron Liepert’s rationale is a single governance board will lead to better outcomes, address wait lists and wait times in emergency rooms and provide faster access to a family doctor.
“I’m going to approach this thing positively. This is the direction we’re going,” Ady said. “If we want change and things to be better, then we have to do things different.”
Ady has no indication yet about whether any jobs are at risk within Chinook.
Pastoor said more information is needed to provide a clearer picture.
“The devil’s in the details, so until this unravels a little bit more I don’t think anybody is really going to know, but I think everyone out there is kind of unnerved,” she said. “I believe in elected health-care boards. If there’s anything good it will be that there will be standards for the province so everybody, theoretically, should be able to count on the same care no matter what region they’re in.”
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