The Canalta Jurassic Hotel hosted an in-person engagement session for area health care workers and Albertans last Wednesday, February 7, 2024, to provide feedback about the issues within Alberta’s Health Services (AHS) system. This is one of 50 in-person engagement sessions being held across Alberta that started in January and will continue until April, 2024.
The main goal of these discussions is to find ways to improve patient care and put better support in place for health care workers to overall build a stronger health care system within the province.
Alberta’s Health Minister Adriana LaGrange spoke to the more than 60 attendees about some of the concerns in AHS. “I know, since I’ve become the Minister of Health, that things aren’t working the way they should be working,” she says, “There is nothing more important than health care. At the end of the day it’s about lives, the lives that are impacted by the health care that is being received. We all have stories about health care where it’s worked really, really well. I had eye cancer in 2012, and you know what? It worked extremely well. I also have stories where it didn’t work so well. We need to look at how we can make things better. People's lives hang in the balance, and that’s what I think about each and every day. There are 4.7 million Albertans that are looking to us to make sure that they have the best health care possible. That’s the only goal I have, as the Minister of Health, is to make sure we have the best health care possible.”
From long wait times in hospitals to the lack of health care workers, especially with the shortage of doctors, patients in Alberta are facing multiple challenges when it comes to their health care. Whether its people dealing with mental health crises or people on long wait lists for surgical procedures, it is said that something needs to change and resources need to be made more available for those who are in dire need of a better system.
The feedback and opinions of those who attend these discussions will help in designing a more functional health care system for Albertans.
