According to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, finding anesthesiologists who are willing to work in rural Alberta is just a matter of giving local hospital managers the power to hire them.
Or something.
“If we had managers at that local facility making decisions for the community about what services should be provided in that community, I’m convinced they would find the people,” Smith told a group of doubtless bemused reporters after a luncheon address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce yesterday.
“They’d find the anesthesiologists,” she said, according to the CBC’s transcription. “They’d find the staffing.”
“That’s the reason why you need more management closer to home at each individual hospital,” she continued.
Never mind the national shortage of anesthesiologists – the high-paid specialist physicians who administer anaesthetic drugs and keep patients alive before, during, and immediately after surgery – that’s causing delays for surgeries everywhere in Canada.
And never mind that it’s always been hard to find medical and surgical specialists willing to live outside big cities, let alone in one-horse towns on the Canadian Prairies – a fact that elsewhere in her chat with the media, Smith admits is so.
Or that there are already managers at every one of those rural hospitals that are cancelling surgeries because they can’t find an anesthesiologist.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows this is bonkers. That includes Smith. She does not believe that the law of supply and demand will be suspended presto chango if you hand the problem to local hospital managers, any more than the readers of this column.
But stick a mike in her face and she’s likely to blurt out a lot of strange little pearls of wisdom, outright contradictions, and even the occasional thing that makes sense.
It’s a measure of her contempt for Alberta voters, I suppose, which some would argue is justified.
In a short clip posted by Postmedia, Smith says of her AHS decentralization scheme: “It’s a matter of building a system where you’ve got local decision-makers at each facility, building into a regional system where decisions are made in a region, building into a province-wide system, where everything is integrated.”
She sounds convincing throughout. But read that again, slowly, and think about it. It’s a kind of word salad that might be called a stream of unconsciousness.
I’m convinced that Smith does this when she’s trying to deceive her listeners about what she really has in mind.
In this case, it isn’t decentralization as much as utilizing local conditions to justify dangerous and unpopular health care policy decisions, including destructive privatization schemes. All while keeping her United Conservative Party’s anti-vaccine, anti-abortion base sweet.
Unsurprisingly, there is no press release on the Government of Alberta website about what Smith had to say to the reporters yesterday. Alberta Health Services told journalists who bothered to call that they didn’t really have anything to say about it, either. Well, you can hardly blame them for that, since they’re already Smith’s No. 1 whipping boy.
Indeed, I suspect Smith would still like to set up a purge of public health managers who led the fight against COVID-19, a topic on which she still entertains bizarre conspiracy fantasies.
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