Danielle Larivee, a vice-president at the United Nurses of Alberta, said nurses are “very alarmed” by hospital transfers she said could negatively affect care and drive critical health-care workers from the province.
Like Parks, Larivee said the worry is the restructuring will lead to more bureaucracy and less co-ordination across the system.
“We’re not seeing any evidence at all to support the idea that this is about improving access to care, about improving services or even about saving money,” said Larivee in an interview.
“If we’re not saving money and not making care better, why are we doing it?”
There should be a special place in hell for people who privatize public services
(Edit: And separate from abstract issues with privatization, we already know that the new healthcare administrator Smith wants to bring in specifically excludes - for religious reasons - reproductive care (for women) like birth control and abortions. That’s right. We’re rolling back our clocks about a 100 years on the separation of church and state. And with healthcare being a provincial mandate - will Albertans whose local healthcare is under the new Christian and/or Catholic administration be able to drive across provincial lines for birth control or an abortion? It’s hard to believe these might be relevant questions IN CANADA in the next few years)
