Medicine Hat emergency physician Paul Parks delivered the guest address and answered questions at Tuesday's event. "Refocusing is a word that really does get under my skin, because it's a euphemism for disintegrating," he told the crowd of the province's health-care changes.--NEWS PHOTO ZOE MASON
zmason@medicinehatnews.com
More than a hundred people turned out to St. John’s Presbyterian Church on Tuesday to join the Friends of Medicare for a town hall event, “An Urgent Conversation: Public Health Care in Medicine Hat.”
Friends of Medicare has partnered with local emergency physician and public health advocate Dr. Paul Parks to tour the province with these town hall events to discuss sweeping changes to the health-care system.
The first event was hosted in Lethbridge on Sunday. The next two will be in Red Deer and Fort McMurray later this month.
“Albertans can’t access the care they need when they need it. That’s a constant story, no matter what part of the province we’re in,” FoM executive director Chris Gallaway told the News.
FoM has chapters province-wide, and Gallaway says they’ve been hearing from Albertans who feel out of the loop when it comes to the refocusing of the health care system.
“We want the government to stop destroying things,” said Gallaway. “And we do think they’re actively destroying things in a lot of ways.”
Like other critics, Gallaway says the root of Alberta’s woes comes back to workforce. The ministers overseeing the new four-pillar health system have failed to provide concrete answers to questions regarding workforce planning.
“Other jurisdictions are doing that. We’re not, and we’re losing out on folks moving away. We’re not retaining our doctors and nurses and health-care workers, and we’re not recruiting new ones. We’re hearing from students who don’t want to work in Alberta when they graduate.”
This week, the province announced a new organization for co-ordinating administrative duties across the four pillars, hospital service providers and the sub-structures that govern things like cancer care.
“It’s because they figured out that blowing it up ruins the integration,” said Gallaway. “We don’t need more agencies. It’s just creating chaos and layers and layers of bureaucracy that have nothing to do with providing care on the ground.”
Hosts, participants critique privatization
Parks gave a 40-minute talk outlining changes the province has made and the challenges he says they pose to effective health-care delivery. He concluded by asking attendees to demand radical transparency, accountability and prioritization of equitable access to public health care from the province.
Participants asked Parks questions about workforce, working conditions in hospitals and changes to provincial policy. Some also shared personal testimonies about experiencing blocks while trying to access care.
“The bottleneck on everything is human beings,” said Parks. “You can build all the buildings you want, you can buy all the machines that go ‘ping.’ If you don’t have technicians, if you don’t have the people to operate them, they’re useless and they don’t help us.”
Parks criticized the proposal to build an urgent care centre in the area, saying that operating rooms in Medicine Hat are often left empty for lack of staff like anesthetists and post-operative care nurses. He says an urgent care facility would only drain more resources away from the hospital, which is already pinched.
Parks also says urgent care centres and chartered surgical facilities, by offering practitioners regular hours and easier procedures, will attract burned-out physicians away from gruelling but needed hospital care in the absence of government policies that prioritize workforce planning and incentivize public health care.
“I don’t blame my colleagues for making that choice,” he said. “In fact, the government is driving that choice.”
Although the event was full of alarming testimony, hosts and participants alike said they remain committed to protecting public health care in the province.
“I feel bad being the voice of the system not working,” said Parks. “I do want to say: everything I’m talking about is about getting access. When you can get into our system, when you can get access, you get the best in the world. There’s no question in my mind that we can deliver state of the art, top health care.”
Parks and Gallaway closed the event by emphasizing the cross-partisan concerns they’ve encouraged over the course of their advocacy.
“The vast majority of Albertans agree with us. They want public health care. They support it regardless of how they voted, regardless of all sorts of other factors. The vast majority of people want public health care, and they’re worried about it right now,” said Gallaway.
“Health care has to be built on data and not dogma,” said Parks. “It has to be led by experts and not by ideology.”
However, several participants did raise partisan critiques, with one participant invited attendees to take part in a province-wide initiative to launch recall petitions for UCP MLAs.
Mayor Linnsie Clark was in attendance at Tuesday’s event. Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Justin Wright and Clark did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
