Premier Smith speaks on Alberta healthcare reforms
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
196.64249
Summary
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
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I always worry when I make a joke because people take me so seriously when I joke around, but I
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have joked in the past that the job I really wanted to have was health minister because
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there's so many reasons for it. Number one is it is the core business of a provincial government
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to deliver health care and to deliver it well. Under our constitution, it falls to the provinces.
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Under the way that we've structured our finances, we've got the federal government being a major
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player and it is the biggest budget item. And if it's not working well, it touches every
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one of us. If you can't get the care you need or your loved one can't or your aging parents
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can't, it affects so much of your life. So it is the one thing that we have to do well.
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That's one part of it. The other part of it is that if we're continuing to put more and
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more money into health care and get worse and worse results, then money isn't the issue.
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It's a restructuring issue. And that affects everything because if you end up putting an
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extra couple of percentage points above inflation and population into health care, it means that
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you can't fund all the other things people care about. It means it takes money away from
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your education, from social services, from seniors care. So I would say that to me, getting health
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care right is just the essential work of a provincial government to do and is why I put such a focus
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on it. Well, let's start with some of the things that you've already put in place. I know
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there's been reform to the ambulance system, the way that they're triaged. There's been
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major noted improvement there. You've obviously let go of the AHS board. Speak to those things
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and what you're hoping to accomplish. Well, let me tell you when I first started realizing
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we had a problem in health care. It was when I was an intern at the Fraser Institute in
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1996, 97, and there was a waiting your turn survey. So it takes us back a few years. It's
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over 25 years. And already we were beginning to see problems with the health care system.
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Because remember, I think the Canada Health Act came in in 1984. So there we were just over
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10 years later, and we're seeing weights between seeing a specialist continue to get longer and
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longer. Specialists in surgery get longer and longer. So I've been watching that survey year
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after year. And I remember even when I started into media, it was like I was writing the same
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editorials over and over again about some of the structural reforms that were needed to make the
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system work well. So one of the things when I came in is we needed to set the tone that we were
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going to be a lot more involved. Because what I had observed happen, particularly in Alberta, is that
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when things weren't working, they said, well, let's just centralize. That'll allow us to get rid of
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administration. So we went from individual hospital boards, 17 regions to nine regions to a single
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super board. And then almost from day one, the super board wasn't working. And I think what happens
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then is it's now it's become such a big problem that do we have the ability to get in as politicians
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and try to solve it. And so you watch premier after premier and health minister after health minister
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just write bigger and bigger checks. And so I thought it's a bit of a risk to take on health
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reform this far this close to an election. But we've got to do it because for all the reasons that
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I've already said. So we replaced the board with an administrator. And we gave the existing group of
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senior executives a year to make some positive improvements. And and they started to we give them
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pretty clear direction. We don't want our paramedics to be parked in in waiting areas their entire shifts,
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we want a flow of going through the hospital so you can see a pathway to either getting treated
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and released or admitted. We want to see our surgical wait times go down. And we want to make sure that
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we're addressing the issues of getting people with family doctors. And we started making some progress,
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but not enough. And you know how it happens in the private sector if the management aren't able
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to perform the way you need them to, you change management.