SASKATOON – A new comment in Alberta nursing circles is that to premier Ralph Klein, replacing hospitals with home care means telling patients, “go home, we don’t care.”
Under the provincial government’s plan to balance the budget by 1997, the health-care sector is taking the largest chop – $734 million – which is 18 percent off the government’s largest-cost department.
Last summer the province set up 17 regional health authorities with appointed boards to take over from 190 hospital boards. It closed two hospitals in Calgary and one in Edmonton.
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None of the 120 rural hospitals are officially slated for closure but government MLA Lyle Oberg, who is chairing the health reform committee, was quoted in The Edmonton Journal as saying 10 to 15 rural facilities will close in the next few years. Last week some northern boards announced staff and bed cuts and hospital conversions, but no closures.
When Saskatchewan underwent a similar reform in 1993, it cut $45 million from its budget by creating 30 district boards to replace about 140 local boards and closing or converting 52 rural hospitals.
Millions in reductions
Tom Seaman, chief executive officer of the Palliser health authority, based in Medicine Hat, said the reduction amounted to $7.2 million last year in his region.
This April 1, when the 17 health authorities officially take over health-care responsibility, Palliser region’s budget will be $58 million. There were no closures but the Empress facility will change from acute (emergency) to long-term (nursing home) care. On paper there’s a loss of 100 acute-care beds, but many of these were not being used.
There will also be layoffs but Seaman said with early retirements and severance packages there should be only a dozen involuntary layoffs.
Public response to the changes has been mixed, Seaman said. Most of the public’s input was during round table discussions held throughout the province last year.
“Some suggest we devote more funds to health promotion or they have a concern about a specific lack of service in their community.”
The Chinook authority, based in Fort Macleod, has been getting a lot of public feedback on one issue only, said board Frank Eden. Funding for an acute geriatric centre that was to be rebuilt has been put on hold. People want it built but have different ideas about what it should include.
This region lost $12 million in this fiscal year and must cut another $9 million before April. Whether the board will have to cut staff or facilities “I have an inkling,” said Eden, “but I won’t tell you.”
The United Nurses of Alberta said its members have lost the equivalent of 3,000 full-time nursing jobs.
The nurses’ union’s education officer, Trudy Richardson, said rural areas haven’t been touched yet but that is coming. She said rural hospitals are no longer paying for ambulance transport of patients into larger-centre facilities, so individuals are getting $600 bills.
Return to past
“Rural areas especially have bought this deficit argument,” said Richardson. “They also think when the magic four years is over, everything will go back as it was. Under NAFTA, anything privatized has to stay that way.”
The nurses have formed a Common Front coalition with labor groups, churches, seniors and students to oppose the Alberta cuts. They have organized community action teams in 14 centres to do public education.
