The health care crisis in Alberta has resulted in a leadership crisis with the resignation of Ed Stelmach as premier of the province, according to Edmonton MLA Raj Sherman, who was in St. Paul last Thursday evening as a guest of Shayne Saskiw, the Wildrose Alliance candidate for the Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills riding.
“For years, the front line health professionals have been sounding alarms,” said Sherman, the government’s former parliamentary assistant for health who now sits as an independent MLA as a result of concerns he expressed late last year on the crisis in Alberta’s emergency rooms. The Conservative caucus voted to suspend Sherman for refusing to apologize for his comments. Sherman is an emergency room physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
“I called it a crisis in 2006 and 2007 … because it was. Mr. Paul Parks, head ER doc representing all the ER docs in the province, wrote a letter to the premier saying the emergency system, life and death, is on the verge of a potential catastrophic collapse.”
Sherman explained paramedics, police officers and ER doctors are all front line staff and deal with life threatening situations on a regular basis.
“We are as tough as they come. We don’t cry wolf. When an ER doctor or nurse says it’s a problem, people better listen,” Sherman said. He added that people are dieing in Emergency citing the example of a young suicidal man who hung himself in the Royal Alex hospital’s emergency room.
“The reason people are dieing is because we have failed the seniors,” said Sherman. “A ward bed costs $438,000 per year. In Edmonton, we have 350 seniors in beds at half a million dollars per year (per bed) and that is what is causing the ER problem.”
He explained that acute care beds are filled with seniors who are in need of long-term care placements. Because the acute care beds are filled, there are no beds to transfer the critically ill patients from emergency; therefore there are no open beds in emergency and people who come into emergency have to wait.
“When you call for an ambulance here in St. Paul and there are non available, it’s because they are sitting for 10 hours waiting to have a patient admitted to emergency in Edmonton,” said Sherman.
Later in the presentation, which attracted a crowd of about 80, Sherman said the wait times at city hospitals are so bad compared to other countries like Great Britain, that a patient could actually catch a plane, travel to London, and see a doctor in the emergency room there and it would be faster than waiting in the emergency ward in Edmonton.
However, Sherman said there are solutions. Improving home care for seniors is a top priority. “Seniors should be at home with their families, where they are familiar and where there are people who love them. All they need is a little more home care support to do that,” said Sherman. He said that if seniors and palliative care patients are removed from the acute care beds, then that would have an immediate impact on the wait times in the emergency rooms with very little increased cost to the system.
Saskiw added that one of the key platforms of the Wildrose Alliance party is to improve home care for seniors including a kinship palliative care program which would allow loved ones to be compensated moderately, to stay at home and care for elder relatives. They would also expand home care services and bring it a better drug plan to support seniors who want to stay in their own homes.
Later in the presentation, Sherman presented documentation, which he said proved that the provincial PC’s were planning to bring in an American style privatized health care system, “… in which you have to produce your credit card before you see the doctor.”
Although MLA Ray Danyluk was unable to attend the presentation because of a previous commitment, he did respond to Sherman’s comment on a privatized health care system the next day stating to the Journal: “Absolutely not. The premier has made it clear that he does not support and our caucus does not support private health care.”
Danyluk said the government has a responsibility to listen to presentations, and read information on all types of health care systems throughout the world to be informed.
“Everybody has a presentation and we have an obligation to listen,” said Danyluk.
He added that as Minister of Infrastructure, seniors housing was a top priority for the government.
In the conclusion of his presentation, Sherman said, that whether people support Saskiw, Danyluk or another candidate, “get engaged, get involved and challenge your elected representatives.”
