$1B repair bill for health centres
The Alberta government is facing a bill of close to $1 billion to repair its aging health facilities across the province, prompting opposition critics to wonder how the government will ever catch up on all the needed work.
Health Minister Fred Horne acknowledged Tuesday the deferred maintenance tab is daunting, especially since the province is committing only $70 million each year to address the list of repairs.
He said the government is responsible for looking after 99 hospitals, the most of any province on a percapita basis. Many of those facilities were built in the 1970s and early ’80s in the Peter Lougheed era, and are now suffering serious breakdowns, from electrical and drainage issues to faulty furnaces and broken elevators.
“A lot of them are coming to an age where they require major investments and we are making those investments where we can,” Horne said.“The demand for money for repairs and maintenance always exceeds the supply. Is there more we can be doing? We are limited by the resources we have, just like every health care system is.”
Horne said he didn’t know how much of that $1-billion tab is for critical projects that must be done quickly to keep the facilities running safely.
Regardless, opposition parties said the government needs to re-examine its spending priorities, since failing infrastructure has the potential to hurt patients, put staff under excessive pressure and increase the operational costs of hospitals.
“They are never, ever, going to catch up at this rate,” Wildrose health critic Heather Forsyth said.
“It’s time this government started being honest with Albertans about the condition of some of their hospitals in this province that need to be fixed.”
Forsyth said her party has Alberta Health Services documents that show Alberta has at least a dozen hospitals in poor condition.
Among the mis the 45-yearold Misericordia Hospital operated by Covenant Health, which last year asked Horne for $33.5 million just to address critical issues, according to documents obtained by the provincial NDP.
“I am writing to you to express the board’s grave concern with the state of the Misericordia,” Covenant’s chairman John Brennan wrote to Horne in an April 26, 2013, letter.
“(The hospital) is increasingly challenged to meet the needs of its patient population due to its deteriorating infrastructure and functional design.”
Brennan goes on to note that a $100-million redevelopment of the hospital had been approved several years ago but was put on hold in 2008 when Alberta Health Services was formed.
“Unfortunately, among the delays in deciding the Misericordia’s redevelopment, its proper maintenance has suffered.”
The letter does not specify what is wrong with the building, but other documents outline a long list of issues, including elevators, the heating and cooling system, fire safety systems, exhaust fumes, and medical gas lines that “could potentially fail at any time.”
Instead of $33.5 million, the Misericordia was granted $19.2 million, though it’s unclear how much of that has gone to repair additional problems caused by a major flood last May.
The new provincial budget does not include any money in the next three years to begin rebuilding the hospital.
“What we can judge on their actions is that they have deliberately allowed the Misericordia to be run into the ground by lack of proper maintenance investment over the past few years and they have failed to make the investment to start building a new hospital,” NDP critic David Eggen said.
Eggen said he suspects the province would be happy to see some of its most aging hospitals decay to the point that it would be too costly to fix all the problems. This would give the government the justification to close the facilities and replace them with cheaper urgent care centres or Family Care Clinics.
Horne denied that the province would deliberately let a health facility deteriorate beyond the point of salvation. However, he acknowledged the government is trying to shift the system so that more people are treated at home or in a doctor’s office rather than a hospital emergency room.
He said the province also has to look at each geographical region and determine if the current health facilities are meeting the needs of patients and providing good value for money.