Medicine Hat is one of many rural communities throughout the province struggling to attract health-care workers, particularly family physicians.--NEWS PHOTO KENDALL KING
kking@medicinehatnews.com
Health Minister Jason Copping says the province is working to strengthen its rural health-care system with an additional $1 billion in budget funding, but critics say the investment still falls short of what’s needed to fix Alberta’s broken system.
Copping spoke on the UCP government’s decision to increase health-care funding by four per cent during a March 30 media roundtable, explaining the primary intention of the investment is to increase system capacity by enhancing facilities and rebuilding the workforce, particularly in rural areas.
“We are making sure we have the necessary funding in place to build and strengthen health care in our rural communities and address barriers to care for those looking for support and treatment close to home and family,” said Copping.
While speaking on the government’s facility enhancement strategy, Copping highlighted a $105-million investment in the Rural Health Facilities Revitalization Program, which will be put toward expanding and modernizing rural health infrastructure, including hospitals, health clinics and EMS stations, as well as home-based care services and congregate-care programs.
And while he emphasized the importance of investment in facilities, he said the greatest investments will be put toward rebuilding the rural health-care work force.
“We clearly recognize that one of the biggest challenges … in providing services in rural Alberta is the lack of people to provide those services,” said Copping. “It’s having an impact on all the services that are open and resulting in temporary closures of some services, whether it be acute care, or emergency departments, or obstetricians.”
Copping admitted Alberta’s health-care worker shortage is an issue which predates the pandemic, but said the pandemic intensified the shortage, thus making attention and retraction of physicians, and other health-care workers, a matter requiring urgent address.
“It’s not only about infrastructure: it’s also about people,” said Copping, reiterating a concern voiced by many of the province’s physicians throughout the pandemic. “We need the people there to be able to provide the services.”
Copping pointed to a $113-million investment in the province’s Health Workforce Strategy, which will finance the creation of 100 new post-graduate physician residency positions, a portion of which will be in rural regions and will focus on disciplines most in need of new practitioners, such as family medicine and obstetrics.
The province will also finance the $72-million creation of 3,400 additional spaces in post-secondary health-care programs and is currently working bolster rural incentives.
NDP health critic David Shepherd says the investment is not enough to address the issues plaguing Alberta’s health-care system, many of which he says the UCP caused.
“The fact is, this government has been cutting health care every single year,” said Shepherd. “We are, today, $1.4 billion below where we should be if they had simply accounted for population growth and inflation; and that’s after coming through a massive pandemic (and) after years of this government making decisions that put politics ahead of public health and deeply undermining our public health-care system and exhausting our frontline staff.”
In his criticism, Shepherd points to recent data from the first round of post-graduate medical residency matches, which show 42 unmatched primary care positions in Alberta, compared to two in B.C. and none in Saskatchewan.
“Of course there are challenges in recruitment and retention in all provinces,” said Shepherd. “But the fact is, in Alberta, we are the only jurisdiction that saw the government directly attacking and undermining health-care workers in the midst of a pandemic … So, the fact that (the UCP’s 2023 budget investment in health care) is larger this year than last, is not the point.”
Designated a regional health centre under provincial guidelines, rather than rural, Medicine Hat’s hospital is not eligible to receive funding through the Rural Health Facilities Revitalization Program. As well, it was not named a recipient of Surgical Initiative Capital Program funding, though both Brooks and Taber’s health centres were.
