The Alberta government’s move to bringing in additional funding to strengthen health care across the province is a welcome. While details are still a bit sparse, at the heart of Premier Danielle Smith’s vision is a $57 million pool of money over three years to help family doctors and nurse practitioners with additional supports to help manage increasing patient numbers, with each provider potentially getting up to $10,000 annually.
Other initiatives include working with the Alberta Medical Association to create a task force to recommend a new payment model for family physicians that encourages comprehensive primary care and developing a memorandum of understanding with the Alberta Medical Association to collaborate on a transition to a new physician compensation model, modernize primary care governance and enable family doctors to spend “more time with patients and less time on paperwork and immediately stabilize primary care.”
The particular focus of these initiatives, namely collaboration and working with the Alberta Medical Association, is an immediate improvement for a UCP government which, up until recently, seemed intent on conflict with the AMA, and forcing doctors to submit to unilateral decrees issued from around the cabinet table.
If these new healthcare initiatives are starting with collaboration, it gives them a better-than-fair chance of success as they roll out into communities across the province.
The new initiatives also recognize the importance of nurse practitioners in providing primary care to communities. The Alberta government will introduce a payment system that supports nurse practitioners in opening their own clinics, taking on patients, and offering services based on their “scope of practice, training and expertise.”
It should go without saying that nurse practitioners are highly trained and skilled primary care providers who go through years of graduate studies to become qualified to examine patients, provide diagnoses and prescribe medication. But, just in case, we have said it.
As for the government’s overall approach here, let’s hope the final result fulfills the promise of it.
