Fred Horne

Alberta Health Minister, Fred Horne, who nowadays doubles as the unofficial chief executive officer of Alberta Health Services, held a news conference in an Edmonton drugstore yesterday and told the respectfully gathered media that not enough Alberta health care workers are immunized against influenza.

Indeed, he claimed, only an alarming and startlingly precise 46 per cent of them have had the flu jab!

A drugstore must have seemed like a great backdrop for this kind of statement because, in Alberta, pharmacists are permitted to give some inoculations — never mind that the pharmacy Horne chose for his star turn had run out of flu vaccine.

All of a sudden, influenza is high on the agenda of the government of Premier Alison Redford again.

This is to be expected: a lot of Albertans are coming down with H1N1 flu this winter, and last time flu was on the public’s radar the province’s response was so confused and inadequate the issue became a huge embarrassment to Premier Redford’s long-ruling Progressive Conservative Party.

The flu is obviously a serious disease that deserves a serious response by health authorities. What’s not so clear, though, is if Alberta Health Services and the government have actually made any strides toward solving the problems that emerged during the Panic of 2009 or if it’s just that the past few flu seasons haven’t been as severe.

In fairness, one thing has changed. After last winter’s health care inquiry, it’s unlikely a professional hockey team will ever again get to jump the queue for flu shots in public! In other ways, though, the 2013 flu season is starting to look a lot like 2009.

AHS has again organized mass immunization clinics — and when you do that this time of year, there’s always the potential that voters in lineups stretching out the door will wait too long in weather that’s too cold. Temperatures are forecast to dip to -32 C this weekend.

With an election scheduled for 2016, maybe the government was trying to immunize itself against potential embarrassment when Horne singled out health care workers’ supposed lack of enthusiasm for inoculations.

Regardless of his motivation, I’m sure a lot of Albertans nodded with enthusiasm, or at least agreement, when the minister promised to do something about it. He told the journalists he’d decided to have AHS report immunization rates among staff in health care worksites across the province and make the information available to the public.

“Education in and of itself is clearly not enough,” the minister huffed, vowing to make the first jab tallies available next week.

Like wow! Impressive, huh?

Well, sorry to spread a little seasonal ice rain on Horne’s parade, but let’s take a deep breath and think about this for a moment.

For starters, are Albertans aware of the sensible compromise now in place at most health care worksites? If there’s an outbreak and a health care worker hasn’t had the shot for any reason, say an allergy to the vaccine, he or she can be put off work without pay for the duration of the outbreak. I don’t think Horne mentioned that.

Then there’s the question of how AHS and Horne came up with what he says is the current count, or how he proposes to keep it up to date.

Other than asking nicely, how can the government and AHS possibly know how many Alberta health care employees have been inoculated against the flu?

Last time I checked, Alberta health care workers were still free individuals like the rest of us who can get a shot from their doctor, pharmacist or an AHS public clinic if they feel like it.

So how do Horne and the executives of AHS know precisely the percentage of the massive public health care provider’s 100,000 or so employees, let alone all the other health care workers in the province, who have been inoculated against the flu? Forty-six per cent of whom? How were they counted?

Next, while you can’t be too careful with public health, how much is this flu jab monitoring scheme going to cost?

If the government proposes to monitor all public health care worksites and presumably update the reports to show what a good job it’s doing, as Horne seemed to suggest, it’s presumably going to cost plenty. That’s money that could be used for front-line health care or preventative measures that are known to work, like up-to-date masks, isolation areas, hand hygiene and of course enough capacity and staff to do the job.

As is often the case with the Redford Government, the details of this announcement were awfully vague.

This is an important question because the Redford Government has effectively declared war on public employees and said there is no money left in the kitty for pay raises to help them keep up with inflation this year or next, and what’s more that they’re going to have a big bite taken out of their pension plans for the same reason. Bitumen Bubble, dontcha know!

So if we’re so broke, how come we have the money for this scheme to closely monitor some 100,000 AHS employees to ensure their vaccination cards are up to date?

I guess if you were wondering how Alberta was going to use that extra billion dollars it got from the feds at the expense of the health care systems in Ontario and other provinces, this might be provide an answer.

Meanwhile, hospitals throughout Alberta are under-staffed and short of capacity needed to handle the surge of flu patients that turn up every winter.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to ensure the system has the bed capacity and staff to handle a surge of seasonal flu cases, something guaranteed to happen every year?

Instead, the AHS response to short staffing is to insist employees who are still sick come back to work before they’re better. It deals with insufficient capacity by cramming patients into “surge capacity” beds in hallways and packed rooms. The inevitable result: more people infected with flu.

Finally, after all the money is spent grandstanding about flu shots, are you really confident AHS can get it right?

This is an organization whose most recent quarterly report on 15 key health care performance measures is now three months overdue. According to the Alberta Liberals, a truncated version of the report appeared momentarily on the AHS website last month, then disappeared when party staffers asked questions about it.

In effect, Horne’s promise yesterday introduces a 16th key performance measure. How likely is it this one won’t suffer the same fate as the other 15, missing in action for a full quarter?

This whole scenario smacks of one more scheme sketched out on the back of a napkin by the PCs’ campaign advisers to quickly fix an emerging political crisis, not as a thoughtful response to a real health care problem.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...