If you thought healthcare was marred in bureaucracy before, do I have a story for you.
The Alberta Government, on the Friday of a long weekend without a subsequent media conference to answer questions, announced changes to its cabinet and a number of those had to do with "refocusing" the health care system.
Alberta now has 27 ministers, more than half of the UCP caucus have a minister's role. Overall, 10 ministers will be taking on new profiles, including Red Deer-North MLA Adriana LaGrange, who moves from Minister of Health, to Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services.
Matt Jones will become Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services, while Jason Nixon's profile changes to Minister of Assisted Living and Social Services to reflect his oversight of Assisted Living Alberta.
Along with those new altered profiles, Rick Wilson takes over as Minister of Mental Health and Addiction to make up the province's four pillars of health care (Primary Care Alberta, Acute Care Alberta, Assisted Living Alberta, and Recovery Alberta) and the appropriate ministers who oversee them.
“I’m pleased to continue the important work of re-focusing our health care system with the support of my colleagues. Moving forward, we will work together to ensure that patients in our health care system have an integrated seamless experience and get the care they need when and where they need it," LaGrange said in a news release from the province.
The Premier said the health portfolio was getting too inflated and needed to be separated out for a variety of reasons.
"The health ministry is $29 billion or it was when we started, it was slowly but surely taking over all aspects of government," she said in an unrelated news conference Friday morning.
"They were getting to a point where they were talking about starting to build social housing, because they have so many alternative level care patients, who have complex needs. We don't want a health ministry that's $35 or $40 billion, so I think we're going to go in the other direction."
In November of 2023, the government announced massive plans to tear down of the province's healthcare system.
Yet, just five years earlier, in 2018, under an NDP government, Alberta Health Services was identified as one of the top 5 integrated health care systems in the world at the 18th International Congress on Integrated Care.
“International delegates were very impressed with what’s happening in our province in terms of integration and ensuring all parts of the health system, and all teams, work together to provide seamless care for patients and families,” said Dr. Richard Lewanczuk at the time, who was then AHS Senior Medical Director of Primary Health Care, who attended the Congress and presented on behalf of AHS.
“We have lots to be proud of at AHS,” he adds. “During a real-time poll of delegates at the Congress, Alberta was ranked second in the world, just behind the world leader, Netherlands, as the national health system from which the most could be learned.”
Alberta is now nearing the end of its refocusing and can hopefully get to work promoting better health outcomes for its citizens, which was the goal of the refocusing in the first place.
Except for Bill 55, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, a major piece of the reorganization, which was passed in a marathon session on Wednesday with limited debate and several interested parties sounded the alarm about potential problems with it.
The Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) and the Alberta Public Health Association (APHA) said Wednesday they are "deeply concerned about Alberta’s proposed Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (Bill 55), which would further consolidate control over public health under the direct authority of the provincial government. The bill proposes to move Medical Officers of Health (MOHs) and public health inspectors from Alberta Health Services (AHS) to Alberta Health, while transferring communicable disease control and other critical public health activities to a newly created agency, Primary Care Alberta," the organization said in a press release.
"While we recognize the need for improved coordination and efficiency in health service delivery, CPHA and APHA caution that the changes proposed in Bill 55 risk undermining the effectiveness, integrity, and independence of public health in Alberta."
The organizations added that there was a lack of stakeholder engagement, an erosion of public health independence and fragmentation of public health care functions.
"Public health relies on community-based, integrated, and coordinated approaches that span surveillance, prevention, health promotion, health protection, and emergency response," they said.
"Fragmenting these functions into an already overburdened primary care system risks reducing the coherence and effectiveness of the public health system, potentially leading to gaps in response, loss of institutional knowledge, and slower containment of public health threats. Furthermore, fragmentation of public health functions raises concerns about medical oversight and support for the functions moving to Primary Care Alberta, which is typically a role filled by MOHs as medical experts in public health and preventive medicine."
The United Nurses of Alberta went a step further, saying the bill is possibly a violation of the Canada Health Act.
"Bill 55, debated in the Legislature last night, will not only permit the Alberta’s health minister to turn public hospitals over to private interests and allow private operators to charge patients fees for services, but it could also permit hospitals to evict sick patients or even turn them out into the streets as we have seen in U.S. cities," the UNA said in a release on May 8.
"Dismantling Alberta’s publicly funded and delivered health care system in favour of private hospitals built and operated with public money will in no way improve health-care access or outcomes and will cost more to run than publicly owned and operated hospitals.
"It is very clear now that despite claims they intend to protect public health care, the UCP plans to open the door wide to full U.S.-style privatization of Alberta’s public health care system, UNA believes."
These are people who know the health care system well and see the problems every day. The language they are using to describe the changes in the 332-page health act should raise alarm bells for all Albertans.
These four pillars and their new ministers have a herculean task of uniting a broken, fragmented system that is not delivering health outcomes that will help Albertans.
Before anyone has time to ask them questions about their new roles and responsibilities, these ministers will take off from the legislature for the summer until October. They won't face the fire on these changes for six months, when the conversation will have surely shifted to other matters.
On the surface, it seems like the problems are just beginning.
Byron Hackett is Managing Editor of the Red Deer Advocate and a Regional Editor for Black Press Media.
