LAC LA BICHE - As Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro was telling the province that additional funds were being dished out to pay doctors in northern and remote communities more money from a fund created for just that purpose, his department was informing 141 communities around Alberta that they were no longer eligible for the funding.
In a province-wide address on Friday morning, Shandro announced the UCP government was topping up Alberta doctors' pay by more than $81 million, his office was chopping subsidized government funding to 141 communities that had been on the Rural Remote Northern Program.
The announced increases to doctors' pay and billing funding followed a month of uncertainty from the medical community following the UCP government's implementation of new provincial legislation in March that saw restrictions to billing amounts and on-call pay for physicians. Part of that uncertainty resulted in some doctors — including 10 from Lac La Biche's Associated Medical Clinic — announcing they would be cancelling their community hospital duties due to lost revenues.
In his statement last Friday, Shandro specifically mentioned examples of increased program pay to Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray doctors. In the case of Lac La Biche doctors, he said increases to the program's incentives —by removing a funding cap on the program — would earn up to $32,000 per year for each doctor. A similar change would see up to $26,000 to the average Fort McMurray physician per year.
RELATED: Lac La Biche doctors and hospital duties
At the time of the initial statement from Shandro, Lac La Biche doctor and W. J. Cadzow Hospital chief of staff Richard Birkill withheld comment until he had a chance to look into all the proposed amendments. He told the POST that "the devil can be in the details" and did produce a copy of the 141 communities being "de-listed" from the northern and remote subsidy program. He did not comment on whether the 10 local doctors are re-thinking their plans to resign their hospital privileges.
At the same time, Fort McMurray - Lac La Biche MLA Laila Goodridge said the changes were an "investment" in doctors, healthcare and communities.
Minister says list is an oversight
Three days after the announcement, and as more people saw the planned changes to communities eligible for the funding, Shandro and Alberta Health officials walked back the list of 141 communities, calling it an "oversight."
Alberta's official government opposition have been quick to condemn the mistake.
“The suggestion that this list of eligible communities was cut by almost a quarter using specific criteria, by mistake, and that this mistake went undetected by the policy staff, the assistant deputy minister, the deputy minister, and the minister himself, and was then published to all of Alberta’s doctors, is preposterous," sad NDP opposition Health critic David Shepherd in a statement to media this morning. “If this colossal error actually went undetected through the entire Alberta Health department, and the Minister himself didn’t check before signing, that is an shocking and unacceptable level of incompetence, which Tyler Shandro must accept responsibility for. But the far more likely explanation is that this is a hasty cover-up of Shandro’s terrible decision-making."
The POST will have comments from Birkill when the doctor is prepared to release a statement.
