Healthcare increased capacities, natural gas consumer rebate on the cards

Edmonton(ATB): If it appeared absurd these past two years that Alberta
would launch into COVID crisis mode every time there were more than 100
patients in intensive-care units across this province of 4.4 million citizens,
then building capacity in our health-care system is something every
freedom-loving, lockdown-hating Albertan will want to ensure our provincial
government gets right.
Interview with Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping and news conference
with Premier Jason Kenney and in the throne speech delivered by Lt.-Gov.
Salma Lakhani, the phrase “building capacity” was uttered repeatedly.
“Despite having one of the best-funded health-care systems in the world,
COVID has revealed shortcomings that we simply must address,” Lakhani
expressed in throne speech from the legislature in Edmonton.
“That means building greater capacity while getting more value for our
immense health-care spending.”
Speaking of immense health-care spending, Copping says it will grow even
more immense. “The health operating budget will hit another record level.
We promised we would maintain or increase funding and we’ve done that
and we will continue to do it, and the focus of our budget is going to be on
building capacity,” he said.
One of the main ways to grow that capacity is to accelerate the Alberta
Surgical Initiative — which will increase the number of surgeries performed
in chartered surgical facilities from the current 15 per cent of all publicly
funded surgeries to 30 per cent — to reduce wait times that have grown
during COVID.
Copping says the government is seeking requests for proposals to build
orthopedic clinics where knee and other surgeries could take place to
reduce surgical wait times, which were too high before COVID-19 hit the
province in March 2020 and grew through each pandemic wave.
“One thing important to underscore is 100 per cent of the surgeries that will
be funded through this initiative are publicly insured. No one has to get out
their credit card — not for one dime,” said Kenney.
He pointed out that most of us, when we go to visit our family physician, are
doing so in a private clinic that is paid for publicly through fee-for-service.
“We need to get serious about health innovation,” said Kenney. “We need
to realize the lesson of COVID is that Canada does not have adequate

health-care capacity. That has to be changed and we believe that the
surgical initiative is a very strong strategy to do so.”
Copping, who has only been health minister for four-and-a-half months,
said “one of the key priorities given to me by the premier was permanently
building capacity within our system, to be able to respond to whatever
COVID throws at us.”
Copping says the province caught up in terms of total numbers of people
waiting for surgeries by August, “but then the fourth wave hit and had a
particular impact on our ICUs, but we continued our focus during the fifth
wave.”
Lakhani said besides major capital investments to expand and modernize
hospital capacity — including the Calgary Cancer Care Centre and the
expansions of the Red Deer Regional Hospital and Edmonton’s
Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute — “the government will increase
health-care capacity by expanding intensive care while training and
recruiting more key health-care workers. This will make our system more
resilient for potential future waves of COVID-19.”
Copping added that the government will bring in a new Continuing Care
Act, which will implement recommendations of a recent review. He said
he’s learned that when it comes to continuing care, Albertans want to stay
in their own homes or as close to home as long as possible.
That April 2021 report — Improving Quality of Life for Residents in Facility-
Based Continuing Care — states that in 2019, when the review was first
ordered, 13 per cent of the population was over 65 years of age. That’s
expected to increase to 20 per cent by 2046, but people “over 80 years of
age are expected to experience the highest growth, with an expected
increase of around 225 per cent” over that time frame.
Some people call that a grey tsunami, and Copping is confident that Alberta
will be able to ride that growing grey wave but we have to get moving now
“to build capacity.”
Dr. Samir Sinha — the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health System and an
associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto — says
whenever he speaks to policy-makers he reminds them that helping the
elderly live longer in their own homes by providing home care is
the only time government can give people what they
want and simultaneously spend less money.
Sinha, who is also the director of health policy research at the National
Institute on Ageing (NIA), says home care is the least costly form of
continuing care. Sinha says that at any given time, about 15 per cent of
hospitalized Canadians are elderly people designated as “alternate level of

care” or patients who should be in a nursing home or in their own home
with more supports.
Building capacity across our entire system — from birth to death — has
been needed for a very long time, even before COVID came along. Here’s
hoping Albertans won’t buy into the fearmongering every time the word
private is used in conjunction with publicly paid health care.