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Provincial: Hospital “Transformation’’ Project coming
Commentary by Jeff Burgar
for South Peace News
It’s a little known fact High Prairie and region once had among the best ambulance services in Alberta.
Now don’t get this wrong. The High Prairie service is pretty well the same service it was ten years ago.
What’s changed is other ambulance services around Alberta have upgraded substantially. This is one good thing of our government.
Ten years ago, many towns and villages in southern and central Alberta steadily complained about their ambulance service.
The main problem was no requirement for a standard service.
Municipalities paid for their ambulance themselves.
In one community, a pickup truck, a stretcher, an oxygen tank and one volunteer was the local ambulance.
As said, such facts escaped the attention of most media and most politicians.
Suggestions were made to collect information about the state of affairs. This would include fatalities perhaps traceable to lack of training or equipment, response times and other situations. Can you imagine phoning your local hospital and they dispatched a half-ton to take your ailing mother - in -40 weather?
Unfortunately, the awareness of some politicians is comparable to a Mandarin orange. Sweet enough but only around for a few weeks each year.
When asked to consider logging response times, one municipal leader in a small town said, “Our drivers are too busy driving to write down when they left the building.’’
The problem is, you can argue up and down, but it’s darn hard to make any case when you don’t have numbers.
In fact, this is one of the main jobs of management - finding numbers, or to put it better, finding ways to measure things. If you can’t measure a situation and compare it, how do you know if you are doing well or bad. And if you change things without measurements, how do you know if you are doing better or worse?
It sounds strange, but our own Alberta Health Services appears to just now be realizing this. In a move called “revolutionary,’’ health workers at the University Hospital are asked about tasks, procedures, and jobs they do that might be improved. They will be measuring.
This will spread across Alberta in the next six months.
Amazing. And this is after the firing of three “million dollar managers’’ who were replaced by Stephen Duckett at $500,000 a year. Obviously, the idea you have to pay good money to get good people isn’t always true.
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