PATIENTS WILL NEED PATIENCE
Hospital cash will take years: Simons
A billion dollars!
That’s how much this week’s provincial budget has pledged for new hospital infrastructure in Edmonton.
Some might think that is huge cause for celebration in a city that hasn’t seen a new full-service hospital since 1988, during which time our population has almost doubled.
Some might think it is spendthrift madness when the government is projecting a $10.3-billion deficit.
But drill into the details, and you’ll find little cause for giddy celebration — or existential despair.
The budget promises $400 million for a “new” Edmonton hospital. It promises $75 million, mostly for a new emergency department, at the Misericordia Hospital. There is $165 million, primarily for a sorely needed new child and adolescent mental-health building at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, and $364 million for new and improved facilities at Capital Care Norwood’s long-term care centre.
But most of the money won’t materialize for years.
The 2017-18 spending plan includes just $7 million for the Misericordia, $7 million for the Royal Alex, and no money at all for that new hospital. Norwood gets $15 million, but that’s the most money health-care infrastructure will actually get right now.
The rest of the promised $1 billion will, in theory, flow over the next four years, with most of the money not available until 2019-2020. Given we’ll have an election around about then, none of this is guaranteed.
Is that a good thing? A bad thing? That very much depends on your perspective.
By promising $1 billion in Edmonton health infrastructure dollars, but only releasing $29 million this year, the government allows itself to look bold and visionary without spending much of anything, a trick that mollifies critics who think the NDP are spending too much, and those who think they’re spending too little.
It was particularly canny to “pre-leak” the announcement of the new hospital to my pal Graham Thomson before the budget, to guarantee an extra day of headline buzz.
Still, there’s more to this health budget than smoke and mirrors. The funding for Norwood seems the most firm. The oldest pavilion of the 205-bed facility, built in 1964, is in deplorable shape. This budget promises funding to rip that wing down, to renovate one of the other aging wings, and to add 145 new beds overall. That’s an important win, not just for Capital Care, which runs the facility, but for the Royal Alexandra Hospital Foundation, which has been advocating hard for major reinvestment in the Royal Alex health nexus.
Similarly, the promise of funds for a new child and adolescent mental-health unit isn’t just great news for vulnerable children. It’s also a signal about the hospital’s future since the long-term plan is to rip down the old child psychiatry wing and to eventually build a new hospital tower on the Royal Alex footprint.
The cash for the Misericordia’s emergency room? That’s a signal to Covenant Health, and to west Edmonton, that the ailing Mis won’t be mothballed. But it’s a hint, too, that the province won’t make a major reinvestment there, and that the hospital might be getting something of a downgrade to be more of a community health centre.
And then there’s that mysterious new hospital, which the province would like to see in affluent southwest Edmonton, perhaps on provincially owned land near 127 Street and Anthony Henday Drive. (That’s the site Mayor Don Iveson and Councillor Bryan Anderson favour.)
But do we really need a whole new suburban hospital, halfway between the Misericordia and the Grey Nuns? For years now, Alberta Health Services has been talking about a big new health campus in northeast Edmonton, which has no full-service hospital. The plan had been to build on the sprawling site of Alberta Hospital Edmonton, while upgrading the long (and still) neglected psychiatric hospital. But the province’s posture suggests Alberta Hospital, and the northeast, might be forgotten again.
Here’s the hardest truth. Hospitals cost a crazy amount to build and maintain. Even if we spend this full $1 billion, at the end of four years, we likely won’t have a single new acute treatment hospital bed. It will cost far more than $400 million to build that new hospital, wherever it goes. And nothing in this budget plan addresses the crisis need to upgrade the Royal Alex, our city’s busiest and oldest full-service hospital.
This week, Edmonton’s health leaders were putting their very best faces on things.
“We are cognizant of the budgetary challenges the province is facing, so any investment we get, I have to say I’m grateful,” Verna Yiu, the CEO of Alberta Health Services told my colleague Keith Gerein.
Yiu said she was excited. Patrick Dumelie, CEO of Covenant Health, which operates the Misericordia, described himself as “elated.”
Veteran heath administrators know, from years of bitter experience with the Tories, that government budget promises don’t always turn into realities, that governments can promise and repromise funds for years before shovels go into the ground. But for Rachel Notley’s NDP, squeezed between low oil prices and public expectations, promises are easy currency to spend.