Only $8 million of the Alberta Government’s $158 million “health workforce strategy” announced last week is directed to the recruitment of nurses, arguably the most desperately needed component of the province’s health care workforce.
By comparison, the United Conservative Party (UCP) government earmarked the lion’s share, $119 million, to attract and retain physicians to rural areas.
Of that, the government said in its news release that $90 million will be directed to already existing (and by the sound of it not very effective) programs to retain and recruit rural physicians, with the remaining $29 million is going to finance a deal made last fall with the Alberta Medical Association to do much the same thing.
Docs for cities? It would appear that’s not as much of a UCP priority, or perhaps not a priority at all, although since the announcement of $158 million in spending only actually accounts for how $127 million of it will be used, maybe Alberta’s cities will get a little from the leftover $31 million.
Still, what comes through most clearly from this is that the UCP is prepared to spend lavishly and inefficiently to shore up its perpetually disaffected rural base, and Alberta cities where most of the population lives can’t expect nearly as much of this new money.
Whether the spending on rural docs will be particularly effective if rural hospitals have to close for lack of nursing staff is another matter, although presumably that impact won’t be obvious until after the expected May 29 provincial election.
Of the $8 million devoted to recruiting nurses, $7 million of that will be “for the targeted recruitment of internationally trained nurses from the United States and the United Kingdom,” the government’s news release said.
Good luck with that if the UCP isn’t prepared to pay nurses salaries that reflect the worldwide shortage of qualified members of their profession, especially Registered Nurses with emergency medicine and surgical experience.
It’s always astounding how a right-wing market fundamentalist political party like the UCP can’t seem to make itself understand the simple concept of supply and demand and its impact on prices.
As a result, the nursing brain drain is much more likely to run in the direction of the United States if recent behaviour by conservative Alberta governments is taken into account.
The $1 million “nurse navigator program” mentioned in the release might be the same thing as a pilot program to set up “an Alberta assessment facility for internationally educated nurses” that was announced the day before yesterday.
However, that news release said only $200,000 would be budgeted for that program, so maybe instead of the same thing, it’s a different and more expensive version of the same thing. Hard to tell. But it does raise the question of whether the government proposes to do both.
Readers are justified to wonder what the heck is going on. The likely answer is that this was the UCP’s panicky response to the NDP Leader and former premier Rachel Notley’s effective Family Health Teams announcement on Wednesday.
Indeed, Health Minister Jason Copping could have been reading right out of the NDP’s Family Health Teams booklet when he told a news conference that “Alberta’s health workforce strategy is a co-ordinated forward-looking path to ensure every Albertan has access to a health home, and that we have the work force in place to deliver the high-quality services Albertans need today and in the future regardless of where you live.”
Only, in the government’s case, it was without much of an actual plan about how to make it happen.
It’s probably a safe bet that the UCP will announce the same spending several more times in varying combinations.
Voters are advised to keep their eyes on the walnut shells. The bean is probably under one of them.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
