The Alberta motel medicine scandal that was still unfolding last week with the premier’s revelation 39 more discharged hospital patients were being housed in Leduc hotels by the same company as the stroke patient at the heart of the original news report is a logical and predictable result of the privatization of health care that the United Conservative Party (UCP) continues to push.
Credit where credit is due, once it became a news story, the Smith Government’s swift response to Contentment Social Services’ failure to pays its bills was appropriate and necessary to ensure clients weren’t tossed into the streets of Leduc.
From a political perspective, the government can now focus with some justice on the inappropriately named company as the scapegoat for a much broader problem created by this and past governments’ approach to public health care.
This is certainly politically smarter than blaming patients themselves for picking the wrong post-hospital care provider, which was the UCP’s and Alberta Health Services (AHS)’ first instinct when the story broke last week.
But it will do nothing to prevent similar situations from arising in the future as fly-by-night operators continue to take advantage of a situation created by the government’s ideological commitment to the triple blight of privatization, financialization, and “red tape reduction.”
Even legitimate corporate care providers will cut corners to maximize profit if they are given the chance – as the UCP just did with its elimination of legislated minimums for personal care in the Continuing Care Act passed last year and the regulations that come into effect on April Fool’s Day.
So this problem isn’t going to go away just because a hammer comes down on Contentment Social Services.
Premier Danielle Smith dropped the startling information that there were 39 more Contentment Social Services clients at risk of losing shelter as a result of the company’s problems during a news conference in Calgary on an unrelated topic.
“We don’t really know much about them, but what we’ve discovered over the last few days is that they used to have rental housing and because of a variety of factors – it sounds like they had a pest management problem – they moved their clients to hotel rooms,” Smith said in response to a reporter’s question.
She said the government has paid a $25,000 hotel bill to forestall the possibility the discharged patients would be evicted.
“From what we can tell, they’re just simply not delivering a level of service that we think is adequate for high need patients, and high-needs individuals,” she continued. So, she promised, “we’ll be working with each individual to make sure that they are with a more appropriate care agency.”
Moreover, she said, “there’s still some work we need to do to understand why they were recommended in the first place. But I would say we’ve now seen demonstration that they’re just not up to the task for being able to care for these vulnerable members of our population.”
This seems like a reasonable response, but it also appears to contradict what Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos were saying only the day before that once patients have been discharged from hospital, they are on their own and need to make their own living arrangements.
“We’re talking about people who are assessed by front-line health care workers to be able to make choices on their own about where they are going after discharge,” Mentzelopoulos said on Thursday.
“This particular non-profit agency … is providing non-medical care, non-medical housing,” LaGrange said at the same Thursday newser.
So which is it? Was Contentment Social Services caring for high needs, vulnerable patients, as the premier said, or discharged patients capable of making decisions on their own, as AHS has been saying?
Meanwhile, the situation that led to the current Motelgate scandal remains murky, with many questions unanswered or inconsistently answered.
Will the government keep Smith’s promise yesterday that there will “absolutely” be more regulation of agencies providing discharged AHS patients with housing, and that there will now be a list compiled with the help of the social services ministry of “accredited agencies”?
And whatever will Dale Nally, the UCP’s minister of red tape reduction, have to say about that?
The NDP Opposition says it has asked the Health Quality Council of Alberta to investigate “how Albertans are being discharged to agencies without proper oversight to ensure every patient is accommodated and properly cared for.”
The premier is unlikely to look with favour on that idea. There may be a reason, after all, that her news conference, to announce provincial funding for the arts in Calgary, began with a singer belting out a rendition of Don’t Stop Believin’.
Yeah, I’m sure the UCP would prefer that we all just hold onto that feelin’ …
About 45 protesters show up to support TBA leader
David Parker doesn’t seem yet to have said how his interview yesterday afternoon with Elections Alberta went, or what he said or didn’t say to them.
On the Ides of March, the founder and financial officer of Take Back Alberta vowed not to provide the Legislature’s elections administration agency with the list of donors to the registered third-party advertiser that he said he’d been asked to hand over.
“I will not be releasing the names of our donors so that they can be harassed by left wing activists,” he said at the time, when he also called on supporters to hold a protest “in light of the rampant corruption at Elections Alberta.”
In the event, about 45 chilly protesters showed up outside the agency’s unassuming office near Edmonton’s former downtown airport. Most were getting along in years and the sensible ones bugged off to the Starbucks across the street as soon as they could decently make an exit.
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