High Prairie hospital may be last in rural Alberta for awhile
The gift shop at the newly opened $228-million High Prairie hospital sells chocolate cigars for celebrating the arrival of a baby.
Down the hall, the gleaming new maternity ward has a special warming machine, a set of shiny new cribs and even ankle bracelets that trigger an alarm when a baby is taken from the ward without permission. There’s just one problem: The facility has no babies.
Despite a sunny 16,000-squaremetre floor plan and a host of modern medical conveniences, the town of 2,600 people in northern Alberta remains on the hunt for qualified staff needed to ramp up services.
From the quiet maternity ward to the unused examination rooms to the surgery suite that has yet to hold a single operation, the High Prairie hospital is a prime illustration of the struggle rural communities often face around health care — while also representing an ongoing conundrum for the cashstrapped government. Even if you build it, the doctors, nurses and patients won’t necessarily come.
“Over the years, this community has had some of the services that we are ramping back up to, and they have lost them through loss of staff or the age of the (former) building,” said Roxanne Stuckless, director of clinical operations for Alberta Health Services’ Area 6, which includes High Prairie.
“With this new facility, we have the ability to recruit and bring back some of those services ... we have to build for the future.”
Stuckless and other health leaders insist the recruitment of obstetrics staff is just a matter of time. Day surgeries are also touted to expand over time, as AHS works out plans for how to split up services for the region among facilities in Slave Lake, High Prairie and McLennan.
The shiny new infrastructure should help with the hirings, though some medical professionals may be more attracted by the model of integrated care the High Prairie facility offers, said Dr. Kevin Worry, AHS medical director for the north zone.
The hospital includes a 67-bed continuing care centre, a primary care clinic and space to co-ordinate community health services such as home care and mental health. Patients, in effect, have a convenient “one-stop shop” for all their health needs that also provides some costefficiencies for the system.
In this respect, health leaders acknowledge the High Prairie Health Complex is a dream facility that several other communities with aging hospitals — including Whitecourt, Wainwright and Cardston — would love to have.
It may be the last such project rural Alberta sees for awhile, given the financial state of the debt- and deficit-ridden provincial government.
The latest provincial capital plan features no new money for any significant rural health project, with the government choosing instead to focus its available funds on the Calgary cancer centre and a suburban hospital for Edmonton.
Exacerbating the funding struggles is that modern health infrastructure, even at the scale of a rural hospital, has become increasingly complex and expensive.
In the case of High Prairie, the project was pegged to be completed in 2011 at a cost of $44 million, but then went through several delays and cost increases that caused the final bill to be five times the initial forecast.