Ken Johnston says the lack of cardiac services in Red Deer can no longer be ignored (rdnewsNOW/Troy Gillard)

By Troy Gillard

HOPING FOR HOSPITAL EXPANSION FUNDING

Councillor calls lack of cardiac care ‘a blight’ on Red Deer

Feb 19, 2020 | 1:03 PM

Ken Johnston isn’t mincing words when discussing the need for hospital and medical service expansion in Red Deer.

“It’s a blight, it’s a scar, it’s a mark on how we are delivering health care in central Alberta,” the impassioned city councillor said Tuesday.

“We have known for fifteen-plus years that our hospital is inadequate. It needs beds, it needs support technology such as the cardiac lab and so forth. We’ve done study after study, discussion after discussion, and yet nothing has come forward in terms of any capital inclusion for the expansion of the hospital or expansion of critical services like cardiac care.”

Hospital expansion remains one of The City of Red Deer’s top advocacy issues for the provincial government, and one they’ll be watching for closely when the next provincial government is tabled Feb. 27.

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Johnston says cardiac services are essential for Red Deer to have because it’s not something that can be simply outsourced to other local hospitals.

“You have to go to the Calgary’s or Edmonton’s for that. There is no other alternative and the mortality rates continue to be 50 or 60 per cent higher in central Alberta when cardiac events occur. That is fact, which AHS does not deny, and yet we find ourselves in the same situation that we found ourselves in 2011 when the cardiac services were first put into a proposed expansion in our city.”

Johnston understands that any hospital expansion in Red Deer will, whenever it’s finally announced, be done in phases and says cardiac service is the most logical place to start.

“The cardiac centre would pay for itself in five years by saving ambulatory costs, STARS or ambulance costs, rehabilitation costs for patients whose heart muscles are now weakened because they couldn’t get timely care, things like that. So yes, I am hoping that in this budget the provincial government will say look, we’re going to start with the most immediate need first, the most mortality intense need first, and that will be the cardiac care.”

Councillor Vesna Higham was angered by the fact that health spending per capita in central Alberta is well below other parts of the province.

“Most of the council around the table attended an event where we were told that the infrastructure funding for the Red Deer Regional Hospital was 2000 per cent less than the average of all the other hospitals in the province,” she recalled. “The average is 2200 to 2400 and we received 250 dollars per-capita. When you see the local discrepancy between what the rest of the province gets and where Red Deer sits, it is shameful that the province continues to not elevate this cause. So I hope and I pray that in the next budget that’s coming in the next few days that the province will acknowledge this.”

Councillor Michael Dawe said Tuesday that previous plans for hospital expansion in Red Deer were abolished when local health authorities were abolished in 2008, and nothing has happened in the 12 years since.

“And worse than that, it’s usually a three to five year timeline to make a decision,” he noted, “so we would be looking at a 20-year time period in which nothing has happened… the city will have grown at least 20 per cent.”

Dawe added, “We can only speak as loud as we can and lobby as much as we can to try and move this forward.”

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