What the hell was the Kenney Government up to last fall when it had the brainstorm to compel Alberta Health Services to ship patients and their surgeons to an apparently under-used surgical facility in B.C.’s Okanagan?
The saga involving what NDP Opposition leader and former premier Rachel Notley called the “slightly less-than-reputable surgical facility” during a news conference in Calgary Wednesday, June 29 can be reasonably described as bizarre.
Indeed, it makes little sense even from the perspective of the market-fundamentalist ideology espoused by Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP).
Documents obtained by the NDP through a freedom of information request show senior AHS officials were opposed to the scheme and recognized it would be controversial if the news ever leaked that the UCP Government wanted to make Alberta surgeons perform knee and hip surgeries on their Alberta patients at the Okanagan Health Surgical Centre in Kelowna, B.C..
The AHS managers couldn’t persuade the elected officials to take ownership of the idea or even announce the scheme themselves.
“Here we go,” said Notley, describing how the process was supposed to work according to the 400 pages of emails and briefing documents FOIPed by the NDP. “An Alberta patient and their Alberta surgeon do the prep work in Alberta. Then they travel together and stay in B.C. in order to get the actual surgery completed. And then they travel back to Alberta together afterwards for the post-surgical care.”
Needless to say, this adds costs for no apparent reason and puts patients at additional risk. AHS didn’t like it, and neither did the doctors.
“The whole plan was utterly ridiculous,” Notley told the news conference. “But the UCP insisted.”
“Government has directed AHS to pilot using an out-of-province chartered surgical facility,” said AHS Clinical Operations Vice-President Sid Viner in an email to other health authority officials.
“This will be a pilot, and is in addition to, not instead of maximizing use of all possible capacity within Alberta,” Dr. Viner told his colleagues in December 2021. “Important to keep this in mind, as I realize most staff and surgeons will wonder why this is being pursued. Again, this is direction from government so we need to pilot without it causing loss of focus or any disruption to maximizing the surgery we will do in Alberta.”
Other emails from Dr. Viner showed “this is controversial and not well supported by clinicians.”
“Feedback on doing surgery at an out-of-province chartered surgical facility was universally negative,” he said of a town hall with clinical department heads and other senior managers.
Notley accused staff in Health Minister Jason Copping’s office of lying about the scheme when word of it leaked to a reporter in Kelowna.
“Even though they were actively exchanging contract language with the Okanagan Health Surgical Centre in the first week or two of February, Jason Copping’s press secretary lied to B.C. media and said no particular negotiations were underway with any facility,” she stated.
Her evidence was a Feb. 11, 2022, email from an AHS contracting director that noted: “Just received an email from Okanagan, they are good with our contract template and we are expecting costing this weekend that we can review early next week … so should be ready to go soon.”
The same day, the minister’s press secretary told the B.C. journalist: “We’re not in negotiations with any clinic. We’ve made some preliminary inquiries as part of contingency planning, depending on what capacity could be available and how fast we can ramp … our own surgical capacity back up in the coming weeks.”
Asked Notley: “Why on earth was the UCP so obsessed with flying Albertans to another province to get their surgeries at a specific facility?”
She said the clinic is “one that the B.C. government will have nothing to do with.”
In 2017, the Okanagan Health Surgical Centre was also included by the Globe and Mail on a list of private Canadian medical facilities at which physicians were charging both government and patients privately in what the newspaper termed an “illegal double-dipping practice.”
“We all are extremely concerned to learn of this secret plan while we can see the UCP sabotaging the health care system,” Notley said, while recounting a litany of system-wide failings including shortages of doctors and nurses, shuttered Emergency Rooms, cancelled surgeries, and long waits for ambulances.
While it is not known if or when the plan actually went into operation, other correspondence in the FOIP trove suggests that AHS expected “low acuity procedures” to commence in January 2022 “as requested by the gov.”
That same month, Dr. Viner said in an email, “despite our best efforts to change their views, government is still intent on at least piloting having Albertans have surgeries out of province.”
Meanwhile, Copping and two aides are still enjoying their visit to Denmark where, according to the government’s news release last Friday, they are attending an “international forum” on the Scandinavian country’s health care innovations.
There is no information on the conference to be found on the Web but for reprints of the news release published by the Alberta Government.
After Copping is finished conferring in Denmark, he and his aides will fly to London on July 4, where they will meet “with health leaders and specialists to gain insight into their health system practices and share areas of focus for transformation and change in Alberta.”
This sounds like bureaucratese for being wined and dined by providers of private health services, this time British ones.
The sojourners are scheduled to return to Alberta on July 7.
Where did all the COVID money go?
Alberta media may have ignored Notley’s newser about the Okanagan surgery scheme, but at least some reporters covered Auditor General Doug Wylie’s shocking report on the Kenney Government’s failure to keep track of how it spent $4 billion it says was used to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the auditors, the government apparently “could not trace” where $1.3 billion in federal safe-restart funds went. Nor could the Health Department recall how much it spent on personal-protective equipment, contract tracing and rapid testing. As for how many vaccine doses it received from Ottawa, it had no idea about that either.
Said Alberta NDP Finance Critic Shannon Phillips: “The gross incompetence outlined in this report is jaw-dropping.”
Supporters of UCP leadership candidate Travis Toews, meanwhile, want you to think he was Alberta’s best finance minister ever.
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