Western Standard - January 05, 2024


Premier Smith speaks on Alberta healthcare reforms

Topics
health care reforms
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

196.64

Word count

777

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Alberta s premier, Alison Redford, talks about her vision for the future of health care in the province and why she believes it s the single most important issue facing our province. She also talks about the challenges facing our health care system and how she and her team are working to fix them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 I always worry when I make a joke because people take me so seriously when I joke around, but I
00:00:04.380 have joked in the past that the job I really wanted to have was health minister because
00:00:08.660 there's so many reasons for it. Number one is it is the core business of a provincial government
00:00:16.040 to deliver health care and to deliver it well. Under our constitution, it falls to the provinces.
00:00:23.660 Under the way that we've structured our finances, we've got the federal government being a major
00:00:27.280 player and it is the biggest budget item. And if it's not working well, it touches every
00:00:32.180 one of us. If you can't get the care you need or your loved one can't or your aging parents
00:00:36.700 can't, it affects so much of your life. So it is the one thing that we have to do well.
00:00:40.820 That's one part of it. The other part of it is that if we're continuing to put more and
00:00:46.420 more money into health care and get worse and worse results, then money isn't the issue. 0.80
00:00:52.880 It's a restructuring issue. And that affects everything because if you end up putting an
00:00:58.680 extra couple of percentage points above inflation and population into health care, it means that
00:01:03.680 you can't fund all the other things people care about. It means it takes money away from
00:01:07.740 your education, from social services, from seniors care. So I would say that to me, getting health
00:01:14.160 care right is just the essential work of a provincial government to do and is why I put such a focus
00:01:19.040 on it. Well, let's start with some of the things that you've already put in place. I know
00:01:22.800 there's been reform to the ambulance system, the way that they're triaged. There's been
00:01:27.940 major noted improvement there. You've obviously let go of the AHS board. Speak to those things
00:01:34.120 and what you're hoping to accomplish. Well, let me tell you when I first started realizing
00:01:38.960 we had a problem in health care. It was when I was an intern at the Fraser Institute in
00:01:43.880 1996, 97, and there was a waiting your turn survey. So it takes us back a few years. It's
00:01:52.280 over 25 years. And already we were beginning to see problems with the health care system.
00:01:58.280 Because remember, I think the Canada Health Act came in in 1984. So there we were just over
00:02:05.940 10 years later, and we're seeing weights between seeing a specialist continue to get longer and
00:02:11.880 longer. Specialists in surgery get longer and longer. So I've been watching that survey year
00:02:17.060 after year. And I remember even when I started into media, it was like I was writing the same
00:02:22.980 editorials over and over again about some of the structural reforms that were needed to make the
00:02:26.820 system work well. So one of the things when I came in is we needed to set the tone that we were
00:02:33.860 going to be a lot more involved. Because what I had observed happen, particularly in Alberta, is that
00:02:39.480 when things weren't working, they said, well, let's just centralize. That'll allow us to get rid of
00:02:42.720 administration. So we went from individual hospital boards, 17 regions to nine regions to a single
00:02:47.640 super board. And then almost from day one, the super board wasn't working. And I think what happens
00:02:53.160 then is it's now it's become such a big problem that do we have the ability to get in as politicians
00:02:59.440 and try to solve it. And so you watch premier after premier and health minister after health minister
00:03:05.620 just write bigger and bigger checks. And so I thought it's a bit of a risk to take on health
00:03:09.820 reform this far this close to an election. But we've got to do it because for all the reasons that
00:03:14.840 I've already said. So we replaced the board with an administrator. And we gave the existing group of
00:03:21.460 senior executives a year to make some positive improvements. And and they started to we give them
00:03:26.460 pretty clear direction. We don't want our paramedics to be parked in in waiting areas their entire shifts,
00:03:32.840 we want a flow of going through the hospital so you can see a pathway to either getting treated
00:03:37.760 and released or admitted. We want to see our surgical wait times go down. And we want to make sure that
00:03:43.800 we're addressing the issues of getting people with family doctors. And we started making some progress,
00:03:49.800 but not enough. And you know how it happens in the private sector if the management aren't able
00:03:54.660 to perform the way you need them to, you change management.