Content area
Full Text
Recently blessed with new funding and eHealth success, Alberta may be ahead when it comes to healthcare reform. Then again, maybe it's not.
IN NOVEMBER 2002, talk of healthcare reform was at a fever pitch. Senator Kirby had just released his recommendations for the health system's future, and healthcare players were poised for Roy Romanow's version. Earlier that year, Don Mazankowksi released Alberta's version of a healthcare reform plan. Fast forward nearly two years. While national healthcare reform talk still swirls, many of the 44 recommendations made by Mazankowski and his colleagues on the Premier's Advisory Council on Health have been largely implemented by the Alberta government.
Along with the reform progress, the province has also made notable gains on the e-Health front, and recently pumped fresh investments-to the tune of $700 million-to improve healthcare-the kind of good news not seen in other jurisdictions. What's Alberta doing differently? And is it pulling ahead in healthcare?
It's difficult to determine areas in which Alberta, or any province for that matter, excels in providing healthcare services, says Stephen Lewis, a health policy analyst in Saskatchewan and adjunct professor at the University of Calgary's department of community health services. Looking at CIHI reports on health indicators, "across the country, some regions do really well on some and some do well on others. I don't think we know enough about any healthcare system in the country to say that one is systematically better than the other on anything like hard outcomes. Certainly on non-health status indicators Alberta is pretty good, but it's a rich province and a young province. I wouldn't attribute that necessarily to the health system," he says.
Those in the thick of Alberta's system, however, say the province began paving the way to positive change years ago. Sheila Weatherill, president and CEO of Capital Region in Edmonton credits regionalization for improving healthcare delivery and opening opportunities...