Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Happy fun time collapsing health care system
124 Plays3 years ago
The executive director of the Friends of Medicare, Sandra Azocar, returns to the pod to discuss the state of Alberta's healthcare system and the deliberate choices by Jason Kenney and the UCP that led to this catastrophe.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Campaign Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, and a podcast on the network that I want to highlight is the latest from the Rob Russo Show, where me, Duncan Kinney, talked to Rob about my very serious Dark Horse Senate campaign that has captured the province's political imagination.
00:00:16
Speaker
Harbinger is a fantastic project. You can become a supporter of Harbinger and get exclusive supporter-only content at harbingermedianetwork.com. Also, the progress report only exists because of the support of people like you. If you can, please consider joining the 500 or so other folks who donate monthly to keep this independent media project going. Jim and I would be incredibly grateful. The link to donate is in the show notes. And that's it. Now, on to the show.
00:00:55
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress
Acknowledgment of Territory and Guest Introduction
00:00:57
Speaker
Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney, and we're recording today here in Amiskwitchi, Waskiagan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the Kasiska-Swanissippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today to discuss how things are just great and nothing terrible is happening at all to our province's healthcare system
00:01:18
Speaker
is Sandra Azakar, the executive director of the Friends of Medicare. Sandra, welcome back to the pod. Thank you for having us.
Healthcare Challenges During COVID-19
00:01:29
Speaker
So, Sandra, how are you doing right now? Are you sleeping? How's your mental health? I mean, I feel like shit. I was actually drinking last night, but that's just my circumstances. What about you?
00:01:42
Speaker
I, uh, you know, that's a, that's a really good question. And I, as an advocate, you don't often get asked that, I think, uh, because people, I don't know, expect you to be on 24 seven. And, uh, but this past 18 months have been crap. And I, and I think.
00:01:59
Speaker
It's the same thing for everybody. I mean, early in the pandemic, very close family members had COVID and we had, you know, prior to the vaccines in place. So, yeah, it was tough times at the beginning. And then watching people, you know, close friends die from COVID hasn't been a fun thing.
00:02:21
Speaker
at the craft that this government continues to do to our public healthcare system hasn't made it a really happy time. So in terms of sleeping, it's usually very troubled sleeping, but you know what, it's nothing to what our healthcare workers are going through. So I think I take at least some solace in the fact that it could always be worse. You could always be a healthcare worker.
00:02:49
Speaker
It could always be worse. You could be a healthcare worker. Uh, yes, very true words. I mean, the stories that are coming out from healthcare workers right now, right? Like the, uh, you know, you have doctors talking about, uh, you know, they're writing obituaries for their patients on Twitter. You know, you have this, this strategy of this, uh, this nurses, ICU nurse season for Emski, who was like front and center of the, of the vaccination campaign. When it first started, like she was doing media and stuff, you know, the tragedy like dying of an apparent overdose, like.
00:03:19
Speaker
She was dealing with shitheads, telling her that COVID was fake and protesting outside her hospital, right? Like in the midst of dealing with a generational healthcare crisis. It's tragic what we're seeing being played out in front of us. Sometimes you kind of shake your head and think it's almost like being in a movie of some
00:03:44
Speaker
gross movie of some kind because it just doesn't seem real that people are behaving in the way that they're behaving and that our government is behaving in the way that they're behaving. I mean, we hear death every day and yesterday's press conference was a perfect example of how there was not even a recognition by Kenny or our newly minted Minister of Health
00:04:11
Speaker
paying respect to those that died yesterday or the day before. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Dina Hinshaw always has her kind of like pro forma. We're very sad that all of these people have died and you know, these, every person was a person and they had a family and it's very sad, but like Kenny doesn't even say that shit and he, and he like never really has. Um, it's just never seemed to phase him at all. He's never kind of like taking a moment to being like, damn, like 20 people died yesterday. That's, it's fucking awful. Uh, but let us,
00:04:42
Speaker
Let us take a moment to just take stock of the totality of just how fucked the healthcare system is in Alberta.
Healthcare System Collapse and Triage Protocols
00:04:51
Speaker
I've got a quote here from Dr. Catherine Smart, president of the Canadian Medical Association, the national group that represents doctors. Quote, what we're seeing now is essentially no ability to provide any other acute care medicine beyond care to people with COVID. So in essence, the healthcare system has already collapsed.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I would agree 100% with that quote. You know, we've been saying that our healthcare system right now is unable to provide much needed healthcare services other than what we're dealing with with COVID patients right now. And so we have become focused on one issue and the rest of our healthcare system has left the trail behind.
00:05:40
Speaker
I mean, yeah, there's been a lot of discussion around, you know, the triage protocols and what in and if, and when they come into effect and what that looks like and how that feels, but like, let's be real.
00:05:50
Speaker
you know, we are already triaging away cancer surgeries and like, you know, treatments that are necessary for people to continue to live. They just aren't going to die tomorrow if they don't get the surgery. You know what I mean? Like the, the talk about kind of these triage protocols elides the fact that like people who need life-saving care are already not getting that life-saving care and they will be affected for the rest of their lives because of it. Right.
00:06:16
Speaker
or people that have chronic issues that have had ongoing issues are also at a disadvantage where they don't know if they get sick from whatever chronic condition they're suffering from if they're going to be able to get timely care. And that's a huge issue when you have politicians and the chief medical officer telling you not to do anything that could get you into an accident because you might not be able to get
00:06:43
Speaker
access to health, you know, my concern is what if there was a massive, you know, industrial accident, or if we had some kind of, you know, tornado, or a bus crash, like who, who's going to be able to deal with that. And it's just unbelievable to me that we're living in a time when this is a concern.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah. Again, the talk of triage, I think, is distracting, right? We are living in a disaster. I don't know what our average death date over the past week is, but it's a lot. The other day we had 34 people die. I think yesterday it was 20. We're recording this on Friday, October 1st.
00:07:32
Speaker
You know, so many people are dying right now that like Dr. Darren Markland, Dr. Dagley on Twitter wrote up a thread that essentially describes the path that people take when they die of COVID in a hospital. And it is, it sounds fucking awful. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:52
Speaker
And I think it's worth discussing this, because a lot of the rest of our chat is going to focus around this. But just a content warning, we are going to talk about people dying of COVID and what that looks like from a doctor's perspective.
ICU Challenges and Decisions
00:08:05
Speaker
But I'm just going to summarize Dr. Darren Marklin's thread here. And so I'll be quoting from him.
00:08:13
Speaker
By the time a patient gets to the ICU, they are already in quite a lot of distress and have low oxygen levels. Internal medicine physicians have already been providing ICU level care on other floors, and they've been treating co-infections, managing non-COVID aspects of patient health, and trying to manage
00:08:35
Speaker
and improve the patient with steroids and monoclonal antibody therapy. If that trajectory is set, they come to Dr. Darren Marklin to be placed on a ventilator. When they come to be placed on a ventilator,
00:08:50
Speaker
That is something that's happened more and more and more, and they are getting very good at putting people on ventilators, and they've learned a lot about how the process works. When someone gets placed on a ventilator, they've been usually infected for about 14 days. Dr. Marklin says, the virus is long gone by now, but if coronavirus was the lightning storm, that what we are dealing with is the wildfire that got out of control.
00:09:17
Speaker
This is why none of the antiviral therapies work in ICU. They are battling uncontrolled inflammation. You know, when you bang your arm and it hurts way more the next day like that, but because COVID targets blood vessels, it's like banging every part of your body.
00:09:34
Speaker
They like putting an ice pack on a bruise. They're using steroids. They're using interleukin blockers and other drugs for people who are late antibody formers. But all that's happening while they are waiting for the infection to go out, for the fire to go out, so they can see what happens next.
00:09:53
Speaker
And this is something I had never heard of, but if that fails and they don't get better, these people might be a candidate for ECMO or extra corporeal membrane oxygenation. Have you ever heard of this, Sandra, until now? Yeah, I had heard it, but it's just, God, this is horrible.
00:10:13
Speaker
They put the patient on what's called a lung bypass circuit and oxygen and CO2 exchange happens outside the body via a giant machine and they stick garden hose sized tubes in your neck and groin in order to move that air around. They can only do about 12 of those at a time in the facility that Dr. Darren Marklin works at.
00:10:34
Speaker
If they don't do that to you, they essentially just monitor you and they treat the things that are happening to you, the surface level stuff that they can see and treat. But at this point, people usually start suffering from acute respiratory distress system.
00:10:51
Speaker
And to keep people with ACR, ARDS, from ripping their lungs apart, they need to sedate them very heavily, sometimes even paralyze them, and it makes people incredibly weak. Now, essentially, this person is just in a bed for weeks while they wait for their lungs to heal. There's no clear way to predict who will get better and when.
00:11:13
Speaker
It's dictated by, as Dr. Darren Marklin says, by genetics and immunity. They know that people are getting better when the ventilators stop making so much noise because the ventilators are not working so hard to push air around.
00:11:27
Speaker
At that point, they start to wake the patients up, and their emergence is often dramatically coming up from deep water. If they struggle too much, they can just get just as sick as they were before. Dr. Darren has seen people get better quickly. Others take longer, and sometimes they talk to families about tracheostomies and long-term ventilation. They may survive, but they will have long-term complications.
00:11:52
Speaker
But Dr. Darren talks about a subset of people. They seem to improve initially, but despite everything that all the medical care that they receive, they deteriorate after a week on the ventilator. No matter what we do, their lungs gets stiffer and stiffer. Instead of healing, their lungs are replaced by scar tissue.
00:12:08
Speaker
The doctors search for hidden infections, scan for blood clots, look for strange drug reactions to autoimmune disease, and over the ensuing weeks, their heart starts to fail from the tremendous work of pushing blood through fibrous lungs. Deprived of blood, the kidneys fail first. Dialysis will keep them going forward for a while longer, but without lung transplantation, the heart eventually stops.
00:12:31
Speaker
Often, we sit down with families before these final things happen to let them know the path their loved ones are on. We seek out their values and goals. We let them know what we can accomplish and what we can't. It's often choosing between the lesser of two evils, and I often am conflicted about putting people in such difficult positions.
00:12:49
Speaker
The journey of dying in the ICU from COVID-19 takes an average of about six weeks. Despite our resources and technology, we can do little but support patients and their families through the process waiting for them to heal. And though most of us who read this know that vaccination can prevent almost all of this is why those of us in healthcare struggle, knowing that this is now preventable.
Public Health and Misinformation
00:13:11
Speaker
And it's a thought that torments us through every day of those six weeks.
00:13:19
Speaker
That's a harsh reality that health care workers are living through and families of people that are dying from COVID live through. There's no words to describe the path of death that this virus is leaving behind.
00:13:41
Speaker
And this is why I don't like like dunking on anti-vaxxers. Like I don't want people to die like this. This is fucking awful. And, and you know, despite the fact that these, the political views of anti-vaxxers are odious.
00:13:58
Speaker
And they could never have to deal with this fucking terrible death by getting a couple of simple fucking shots. I don't like writing people off like that. But I think I don't want to focus on individual decisions. I'd much rather focus on the systemic problems of how we got.
00:14:18
Speaker
to this place where Alberta has the lowest vaccinations rates in the country. Where do you come in, Sandra? Why do you think Alberta has such low vaccination rates and how much blame can we put on government policy or political culture? Pick your issue.
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, you know what, I think it's a mix of all those things that you mentioned. Initially, when we were waiting for this magical cure, this vaccine to come out, I think that that would have been the time for governments to set some real plans around how they would be doing their vaccination rollout, all the public education that needed to be done. But instead, what we heard was mixed messages, you know, and then you get
00:15:04
Speaker
you get to hear and see all the stuff that's online. The access to misinformation that's available online is just incredible. And so what you need at that time is really strong leadership that can actually provide consistent
00:15:23
Speaker
consistent information that has a consistent plan, a plan that was meant to be rolled out as soon as the vaccines were available. But what happened was that, you know, we would hear messaging from all over the place. Hinshaw would say something. Dr. Tam would say something. Kenny basically would change whatever he felt the vaccines or this, or COVID was. You know, we had Trump at that time in the United States.
00:15:52
Speaker
speaking off about what COVID was. And so there was all kinds of stuff. And so what happens is that any kind of discontent that people have around government and institutional structures are projected onto the vaccines, unfortunately. And then we get away from the science. And then it leads to all kinds of what we're seeing right now, where people are
00:16:20
Speaker
I think in a lot of ways this discussion has become so politicized and has such a strong public response. It's kind of like issues like climate change. Some people believe in it, some people don't. It's politicized issues that have really strong public responses. And how do you control that is by actually creating a political environment where people trust the government.
00:16:46
Speaker
And again and again, what we're going to hear during this discussion is the fact that people have lost trust in our leadership in this province and in a lot of ways around the world. And so it's been a long time coming, but it's been, you know, expanded in a thousandfold because of the crisis that we're currently living in.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think we have enough evidence at this point to kind of just declare that hard right conservative ideology and their attendant media ecosystems are a danger to public health.
00:17:28
Speaker
Even the World Health Organization, even before COVID became a thing, they had already identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top global health threats, along with climate change and pollution.
00:17:43
Speaker
And so we know that the stage was set there. And then you also look at how for years now, I want to use it, the neoliberal thought and that sense of individualism that has taken priority over collective good, it's a huge issue, right?
00:18:08
Speaker
Exactly. I don't say that lightly. When you're talking about an ideology and media as being a danger to public health, I don't throw that around lightly. I think it's a very heavy charge to make against someone.
00:18:26
Speaker
when you have a media ecosystem in Alberta and across Canada and across North America that is actively working so that people die in the most terrible fucking way and are dying in droves. Then the knock-on effects of this selfishness is
00:18:48
Speaker
people aren't able to get their cancer surgery. People aren't able to get treatment and healthcare that they require just in order to live a life. It is incredibly sad. Politics in Alberta, we have the most fucked up political culture in this country by far. I still think the vast majority of people are able to be reached and reasoned with
00:19:14
Speaker
The reason why I think it's become so bad is that conservative politics has become part of the culture here. When it gets embedded into culture, it gets very hard to reason with. This fourth wave is hitting rural Alberta the hardest. The stats are clear, right?
00:19:38
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And you see, and that's where we have the biggest vaccine hesitancy. And it is a lot of ways cultural and politics sometimes turns into cultural divisions. And so it's a number of things that have caused us to be where we are right now when it comes to vaccine hesitancy. I mean, and you see it all over the place. And I'm sure that you have friends that
00:20:04
Speaker
somehow have gone down a deep rabbit hole where it's really difficult to kind of get out of because now they truly believe the stuff that we're seeing in those protests and they truly believe that. So how do you change that mind? And yet they hear over and over again what it's like to die from COVID. What would it be like for your loved one to die from COVID?
00:20:33
Speaker
And that there is a bit of a solution that we can all have access to. There's millions of people around the world that are dying to get their hands on a vaccine. And yet we scoff at them in a lot of ways.
00:20:47
Speaker
And we have idiots protesting outside of hospitals. All right. I think we've covered this question. I do want to move on to a question that we always ask here on the Progress Report podcast, inspired by
Government Inaction and Criticism
00:21:00
Speaker
Lennon. What is to be done? Sandra, can you walk us through what healthcare workers and doctors are asking for of this government? What are the kind of policy ideas that are coming out of from these folks that would stop the spread of COVID and provide some relief to our healthcare system?
00:21:17
Speaker
You know, right now, everybody who has any kind of knowledge about health care, about how our health care system is understretched, is calling for a firebreak of at least four to six weeks. They want to see a strict reduction on the large gatherings.
00:21:38
Speaker
you know, hockey games and concerts and things like that. They definitely want this government to put in public health measures that will restrict the ability of this virus to spread so freely like we've seen in the past. They want this government to take responsibility and leadership and stop advocating that and basically
00:22:02
Speaker
leaving it up to the school boards or municipalities or businesses to actually put in restrictions. They should be the ones that are actually doing mandatory masking and they are the ones that should be re-implementing province-wide contact tracing.
00:22:21
Speaker
and making sure that masking is required in all door settings, including in classrooms. We want them to actually keep our kids safe by doing contact tracing and letting people know if they've been close contacts. So just basically bringing back some of those public health restrictions that we have seen in the past to deal with this aggressive Delta variant.
00:22:51
Speaker
And Jason Kenney has looked at all of these suggestions, the Canadian Medical Association, the Alberta Medical Association, the pediatrics, the pediatric folks, health care unions, nurses, workers, health care workers, all pretty much calling for the same thing. And Kenney's saying, oh, we got to wait. We got to wait for the data. Yeah, I don't know what that is. And that's what makes me so angry and so frustrated at this government
00:23:15
Speaker
is how many more people is he willing to let die until he feels that enough is enough. It's just unbelievable that he is so...
00:23:29
Speaker
cruel. And I can't say any other. Well, I could say actually quite a few other words that would get me beeped almost everywhere. But it is the fact that he's acting in a very cruel manner. And he is allowing Albertans to continue to die under his watch.
00:23:48
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, let's be clear that the fourth wave and the daily death counts that are so high and the damage that's being done to our healthcare system and the fact that people are not going to be able to get lifesaving care, this is a choice that Kenny is making. He has the ability as the premier of this province to enact measures that would restrict the spread of COVID and to give our healthcare system a break. He's choosing not to.
00:24:12
Speaker
for the economy or because of his wacko base or ideologically he just doesn't want to. Maybe he's a bad person who wants people to die. I mean, I usually don't assume the worst of people, but I think we have more than enough evidence to suggest that Kenny is, if given an opportunity between kind of like acting gravenly and doing the right thing, he will always act gravenly until he is forced by absolute necessity
00:24:40
Speaker
to do something, and this is the joke, right? I think there was a reporter in the press conference, and let's take an opportunity to talk about his latest press conference. There was a press conference that happened, I think it was the second, the last one, where the reporter was like, people are joking, or it's like, you say a thing's not gonna happen, and then a few months later it happens. Why don't you just cut out the middleman and just do the thing that you say you're not gonna do now? And Jason Kenney's like, I reject the premise of your question, which he says all the fucking time.
00:25:08
Speaker
He rejects the premise of absolutely every question that holds him accountable for his lack of leadership and responsibility. Yeah. That was the funny part, one of the funnier parts of yesterday's press conference, which is like, let's, I'm not here to play the blame game. Well, it's like, well, yeah, pretty fucking obvious why you don't want to play the blame game because, uh, you're square right at the fucking center of it. Exactly.
00:25:31
Speaker
I mean, there was a lot of chatter that a lockdown was for sure coming, but folks do not trust unsourced reports on Twitter from people with no track record of reporting high-level UCP decisions. The announcement we got yesterday was an absolute fucking nothing burger. We got an announcement that the Army is showing up, the Red Cross, some nurses from Newfoundland.
00:25:55
Speaker
you know, there was a vaccine mandate for workers in Alberta's public service. But it all came, yeah, it all came amidst the same kind of narrative that he pushes, right? Oh, we're not that bad. You know, Alberta is doing not as bad as, you know, another province during the second or third. He likes to make these comparisons that are ridiculous and are met so that he could underplay the current situation.
00:26:23
Speaker
And he does that on purpose. And I always think, quit comparing those things. If he was a true leader, he would actually be saying, Alberta needs to be the first to cut this. We don't need to compare ourselves to somebody who did worse than us, because that's not where we want to be. We're talking about human lives, not friggin' Fox or some other commodity that
00:26:45
Speaker
that you can sell, that we can sell cheaper or better, or it's just unbelievable to me. When he was comparing Manitoba or Ontario, those waves were before we had vaccines. They were right as vaccines were being rolled out.
00:27:03
Speaker
this wave is unique and to compare it to those past waves is disingenuous and is just Jason Kenney cherry picking fucking stats to make himself feel better. The things that he was announcing instead of a lockdown were there was a bandage on a fucking bullet wound. It was pissing in the ocean. It was nothing. And then he gets, and he has the fucking hubris to stand on stage and massage facts and figure and cherry pick stats to make it seem like we are not
00:27:27
Speaker
in a generational crisis that there isn't a giant hole being blown in the middle of our fucking healthcare system that is going to reverberate for decades, right? I think now is the opportunity to talk about what are we realistically looking at in our healthcare system?
Long-term Healthcare Crisis Impacts
00:27:44
Speaker
What are the long-term effects of this going to be?
00:27:48
Speaker
I think the long-term effects are gonna be, and this is where coming out of this pandemic, we're going to have to reimagine how it is that we basically not control our health, but how do we improve our public health care? What we have seen through this pandemic is a government, well, even before this pandemic, we had already seen a government that was bent
00:28:17
Speaker
on privatization, on basically undermining and definitely not protecting our public health care. They don't believe in public health care, so for them all the damage that they've done is just
00:28:33
Speaker
I think it sets the stage for some very dangerous things that could potentially continue to happen. And allowing more of a role for the private sector is definitely one of those things that could potentially happen. And what we're already seeing the impacts of that when it comes to our healthcare system. And so the damage that we have seen done now, because of all the
00:28:59
Speaker
you know, overstretched staff that we have. It's just, it's not something new, but like you call this COVID pandemic, you know, a generational health crisis. Yeah, it's going to be a generational crisis when the staffing issue becomes even more of a problem.
00:29:18
Speaker
coming out of this pandemic. If we don't have enough staff, we don't have enough beds. And if we don't have enough beds, we don't have enough capacity within our public system. And it's just a domino effect. So I think we're in for a really rough ride once this pandemic is somewhat under control and we can kind of reassess the damage that has been done in this last wave at least.
00:29:44
Speaker
And we do have a bit of precedent here in Alberta too, right? I mean, I'm, uh, I mean, you're a little older than me and you might remember this better, but I, I, I've heard a lot about how a generation of nurses essentially left Alberta, you know, after clients cuts in the nineties. And, and, and like, we're, we're going to see something like that, but like, you know, an order of magnitude larger, right? And not just in nursing and almost all of the kind of
00:30:08
Speaker
doctors, health technicians, paramedics. People are just going to leave this province. They're going to leave the jobs. They're going to find other work to do because they're going to be broken by how this has played out.
00:30:22
Speaker
For sure. And you know, we're also seeing like in the next couple of months, we were supposed to be seeing also the 11,000 support workers that were supposed to be contracted out. That's a huge loss to our public health care system when it comes to workers, right? I mean, those are the general support services of sometimes the people that we don't talk about, but they've also been impacted by
00:30:45
Speaker
what is happening, the cuts and the constant back and forth of undervaluing their work and under-resourcing them. So it's going to be a domino effect that it's going to see our healthcare system fall if we don't fight to kind of ensure that when we get out of this, we're going to be in a position where we need to rebuild our public healthcare.
00:31:09
Speaker
You know, in the 1990s, you're right, we lost a whole generation of nurses. And that's also the time when we started seeing cuts to hospital beds. I mean, to me, a province the size of Alberta, it's just crazy that we only had and that we, when the situation became critical, that it came out that we only had 173 ICU beds available for the entire province.
00:31:35
Speaker
Right. And that was our baseline. That's it. And so any other person that has had to go into the ICU has been search beds that they've had to create as a result of the need that we have. And then we have the new limited minister of health who says that he's going to increase ICU capacity.
00:31:53
Speaker
Well, he's going to increase this capacity by reducing base-like surgical capacity within our public system and buying more from the private sector. And so I think we're going to have to be on guard when it comes to the protection of our public health care in the next couple of months.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's one thing that Friends of Medicare has always done. They've always focused on continued attempts by governments and corporations to privatize ever more and more and more parts of our healthcare system. Right now, you bring up the general support workers and the laundry. I mean, I think that's still happening, right? That's still, like, K-Bro Linens is going to get a big fat government contract and they're going to pay their CEO a nice big fat salary for something that was previously done by public healthcare workers, right? Exactly.
00:32:45
Speaker
and you know and housekeeping and food services those jobs are all on the way out and we because we're all focused on trying to survive things are happening in the background you know lab services was privatized as well and you know and there was a
00:33:05
Speaker
an ad or request for people to go work because right now at the provincial lab there's about 130 positions that need to be filled. When the labs, the lab and the testing is what got us through the first and second wave in terms of, you know, making sure that we had knowledge of who needed to isolate quicker and, you know,
00:33:26
Speaker
Chandra and Kenny touted our lab services as one of the most efficient in North America, that we led the number of testing. And now we see our lab services, again, short staff to the point where they're asking other people to volunteer and go work there. It's crazy. It's out of control. And we're only seeing the impact that it has on patient care, but we're also not, you know,
00:33:54
Speaker
because that's what we're focusing on. We're not getting as much information as we should about what is actually happening in the background to our public health care system.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah. And even just in the foreground, I mean, let's just talk about an example of just how fucked up the system is right now.
EMS Strain and Nurse Negotiations
00:34:15
Speaker
Let's talk about the EMS system or ambulances. So the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, which is the union that represents paramedics, has a Facebook page that I quite frequently just, I just have a tab open all the time. I just periodically refresh it.
00:34:29
Speaker
It's called HSAA EMS, we'll put it in the show notes, and it's where members report the various red alerts, shift drops, downgrades, and cases of mostly rural ambulances heading sometimes an hour, an hour and a half away from their home base in order to provide care. I actually did some tallying. I did three days between September 20th, 28th, and September 30th, three days. We're recording this on Friday, October 1st.
00:34:58
Speaker
There have been 11 rural ambulance shifts that have been dropped due to short staffing. There have been four downgrades of rural ambulance. So they go from advanced care ambulance to, uh, to basic lifesaving. There were 16 separate cases of ambulances being sent far away from their home base deal with issue. Usually this is when rural ambulances outside of a big city get called into the big city. But there were some other examples that were wild too. Ambulances going like an hour away.
00:35:22
Speaker
And there were seven red alerts where there were no ambulances available to respond to emergencies. These were in Calgary and Edmonton, but also Airdrie, Cochran and Drumheller. And then you go to that page and you can kind of see the cascading effects, right? You'll see a downgrade in Cochran and then you'll see a Cochran ambulance that's in Calgary. And then you'll see a red alert in Cochran. It's like, it's,
00:35:47
Speaker
It cascades through our system. This is how we get people to the hospital when there is an emergency. This is a key part of our healthcare system. Yes. I think the situation with the EMS is not new.
00:36:11
Speaker
And it's just been basically worsened by this pandemic. So this is where it's still frustrating to be an advocate because for decades we have called out
00:36:24
Speaker
the trend by a succession of Alberta governments of ongoing piecemeal staffing cuts and resource cuts across the province. And now, during the worst health crisis Alberta has ever seen, we're seeing the full impact of these ongoing health care cuts.
00:36:45
Speaker
And so basically what it has become now is a full meal deal. And this is one of those cases when I wish, you know, I told you so wouldn't be the case or we've been right for decades now and calling this out. But this is just the, you know, basically a signal of all the deficits that we had in our public system that have been made worse by COVID.
00:37:16
Speaker
The constant undermining of our healthcare system and our healthcare workers is what's setting the stage for this current crisis right now as well. So, you know, where do you start? You know, where do you begin to kind of piece everything together? For decades we have been saying you cannot continue to overstretch our public healthcare system. You cannot continue to ask people to do more with less.
00:37:45
Speaker
because at some point it's going to break. Well, we are at that point now. And it's going to take leadership that actually believes in public health care to piece it back together. And not these guys who we currently have in place that are more interested in privatizing and selling our public health care to private for profit people that see Alberta as a fertile ground for profit making.
00:38:16
Speaker
A lot of chickens are coming home to roost in the context of this pandemic, this just-in-time lean system that they've been running for years and years now fails when an event like COVID happens.
00:38:30
Speaker
And the real effect, the effect is, you know, human lives, both, both the people who die as well as the workers who are forced to kind of work in these terrible fucking conditions. And, and again, it's, it's, it's not, uh,
00:38:45
Speaker
This is a conscious decision. These were a series of decisions that were made by government. These are policy choice that led us to the crisis that we're in now. There's one final bit I want to talk about, Sandra. It is a place where maybe even regular people might be able to help out.
00:39:05
Speaker
You know, the nurses, you know, negotiation with the government of Alberta, possibly an upcoming strike. You know, do you know where we're at in regards to those negotiations and what is a likely outcome there? You know, I think this government is actually just taking their time. I don't think they can publicly continue to wage war against the nurses or the physicians for
00:39:34
Speaker
that matter, not just now, but my take on all of this and it's the same thing with the rest of the auxiliary nurses and everybody else that works in
00:39:48
Speaker
in our healthcare system is that this government is going to use this pandemic as an excuse to have to go in there and make cuts. And I have no idea how they're going to be justifying it, but we saw that in the little bit of a fiscal update that Tavesgate not too long ago, where they talk about the fact that we're going to have to tighten our belts and we're going to have to be responsible
00:40:15
Speaker
citizens, I guess, if you want to call us that. But I just think it's that this war is not going to go away. And they might make some concessions. But I think the frontline staff have reached a boiling point. And I don't know what it will take for for them to actually not not consider anything, anything as anything less than
00:40:43
Speaker
Anything that this government has to provide now has been a disrespect for the value of the work that all healthcare workers do. This government is going to have to work to regain that trust and to regain that place where they can actually truly negotiate a fair deal.
00:41:06
Speaker
I think for better or for worse, the United Nurses of Alberta, the union that represents nurses in this province, their negotiations with the government of Alberta over their next contract are really going to set the terms for future negotiations, for what labor militancy looks like throughout the health care system.
00:41:26
Speaker
And the government, I believe, has moved off of zeros. No, the government offered, I think, a 5% wage rollback to nurses initially. And they've moved off that to zeros, essentially, with a couple of minor pay bumps at the end of a contract. But they take away some pay at the beginning of the contract. So essentially, zeros, from my analysis.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah, but it's also, it comes with some losses to their benefits, which translates into about a 2% rollback, right? Exactly. It comes to zeros at the end of it, right? So that's the contract that's currently on the table from the government to the United Nurse of Alberta is this five year minus two off the top and then plus two at the end of the contract. Right. That's a heck of a long contract.
00:42:18
Speaker
five years. Yeah, I would not, I would not negotiate a five year contract with the UCP. I don't know. I don't think they're going to be around that long, but the, uh, but like, if they ever get to a strike, it is, um, it would be, it would be unprecedented. Like the first legal strike of nurses in Alberta, like nurses used to not be able to go on strike in this province until recently. And, uh, you know, it is the responsibility of every, everyone to kind of stand in solidarity with our nurses. If it gets to the point where they're on the street, right?
00:42:48
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I mean, it would be, it just, that's the least that we could do. We always, our thing is that working conditions are care conditions and never has that been more true than now. And so,
00:43:06
Speaker
I think solidarity with any healthcare worker that needs to take their bargaining to the streets, I think it goes without saying that that's where we need to be standing side by side with them. Thanks so much for coming on, Sandra. What's the best way for people to follow along and support the important work you do at the Friends of Medicare?
00:43:29
Speaker
Sure. You guys, everybody can follow us on Twitter at Friends of Medicare. They can join by going to our webpage, www.friendsofmedicare.org. You can become members. It's only 20 bucks a month. Sorry, a year. I wish it was 20 months. $20 a year, five for low income. If you don't want to become a member, but I still want to get our emails, just sign on and we will send you all the information we share.
00:43:58
Speaker
all the time. You know, I think undoubtedly we're going to be looking at what actions can be taken. I think we cannot sit back and let this government continue to do harm to our public health care system. And so it's going to take all of us to stand up to this government and to make sure that coming out of this pandemic we will have
00:44:23
Speaker
we will be able to rebuild from the solid foundation that we currently have in our healthcare system and come out stronger as a society.
00:44:35
Speaker
So that's it for this week's podcast. Thanks again to Sandra for coming on. Thanks to Cosmic Fabio Communist for our amazing theme, and thank you to Jim Story as always for doing the edits. I'm very easy to get a hold of if you think I have missed anything, or if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments, you can reach me on Twitter at atdunkinkinney, and you can reach me by email at dunkinkayatprogressalberta.ca. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.