This is Big!

Premier Smith Taking Back Hospitals

Across Canada, Healthcare systems are collapsing…and I believe that this is for a few main reasons.

1. We have a population of people more reliant on pharmaceutical health than healthy lifestyles;

2. We have a majority of the population who now have damaged immune systems due to becoming lab rats in the worlds largest medical experiment through COVID Vaccines;

3. We’ve added a massive amount of population to the Healthcare system through mass and unsustainable immigration;

Healthcare is the Largest Budget Item for all provinces and seeing the massive strain on the system through the above stated, are forcing the system to bust at the seams. In addition to these…Healthcare has become a highly political arena, where Unions work with Left Leaning political parties and advocacy becomes more important than the care they’re intended to provide.

I’d started to drill into some of these advocacy programs and it’s too large to even throw together in a single post - I’d have to probably write a short book just to get it all together and this rabbit hole goes deep.

Rather than try to summarize all of that here, what I can show is the gaming of the system used by some. Take this registered nurse as an example:

Who made almost 2 Million Dollars for 5 years of service in Alberta, through AHS, with their highest year - 2022, making over half a million dollars with Salary and Benefits.

Of course, this case is exceptional, but from what I’ve heard, gaming the system by part-time workers to make large sums of money through shift swapping and overtime, aren’t uncommon.

From COVID and even prior, Albertans have come to appreciate that AHS is working more to support AHS than is the patients in their care and when Premier Smith took over, she’d started to make some moves.

• Exiting from WEF affiliation and association;

• Firing CMOH - Deena Hinshaw;

• Firing the board of the province's health authority;

• Fired off some warning shots to all employees, stating that if they didn’t have time in front of patients, there’d be some changes coming;

• Investigations into the Pandemic Protocols used by AHS…

But all of these combined, never really seemed to add up to much and with AHS Management being Anti-UCP, they’d seemed bound and determined to completely buck against change and work against the UCP Government.

One play, where AHS teamed with the NDP was most apparent was after the last Provincial Election - Smith and the UCP keeping government in the province, but losing some seats - was to hire back Deena Hinshaw. They were so confident that the NDP would take back the province, they’d rehired the former CMOH, albeit in a different role, to thumb their nose at the UCP and ALL ALBERTANS!

This giant tug-of-war has obviously lent itself to the issues we’re seeing and has left a lot of us wondering, what can be done.

In a July Townhall, What Matters to You? - with Premier Smith, Lougheed CA President, Darrell Komick, held out both of his hands and asked…why can’t the province open up another healthcare entity - showing an empty right hand and then let AHS know that this is the one they’ll be supporting, forcing what would be left in the AHS Left Hand to have to transition over.

The idea seems simple enough…but, given the magnitude of the situation, this would be a very complicated, time consuming and have a lot of potential stumbling blocks along the way…

Flash forward a month in the townhalls and while this exact thing isn’t happening, Premier Smith has introduced a similar idea in order to reclaim hospitals from AHS.

From the Rocky Mountain Outlook reporting on the Drayton Valley UCP Townhall event, Premier Smith introduced a plan to remove AHS as the operator of some provincial hospitals and turn these facilities over to other already existing administrators like Covenant Health - the provincial Catholic Healthcare Provider.

KABOOM!

The Alberta government is currently setting up a structure where the government retains ownership of facilities and leases them to AHS and is “prepared to also take away their authority to operate hospitals as well,” Smith said.

“Because if our operator isn't performing the services we need them to we're going to take (the hospital) back,” Smith said.

“The next phase is to see how many of those hospitals that AHS currently operates that we can retake ownership over. We can't do it for all of them.”

Smith said this strategy will improve the delivery of health care and help eliminate service disruptions in rural hospitals by introducing two incentives into the existing system — competition and fear.

“When you're dealing with a monopoly, and they believe that they can deliver any type of care, and there are no consequences, they’re going to continue to deliver bad service. And competition is one option. That's why we're offering charter surgical centres and why we're offering Covenant,” Smith said.

Now…of course this too will be complicated and time consuming…and of course this will meet with HUGE pushback from AHS management and teams…but given the fact that they’re the ones who have created conditions prime for a collapse and given that Covenant has seemingly implemented more streamlined and effective services, this is the next best thing over completely shattering AHS and rebuilding it from ground up.

There will hopefully be some sort of extensive planning that we will get the 3000 foot view of…but this is Massive in addressing one of the largest issues that Healthcare in Alberta faces and the largest steps that any province will have taken to right the wrongs of a completely tattered system that’s plaguing all healthcare providers in all provinces from Coast to Coast to Coast.

Big win for Smith and the UCP…and while you will read legacy news talk about how this will destroy things…all you need do is look at the comments from those who oppose to realize why this is what absolutely needs to happen.

One more in the win column!

Great job, Premier Smith.

Great job, UCP.

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