By Chris Brown

To be done by the end of 2023

Dynalife transferring provincial lab services to Alberta Precision Labs

Aug 18, 2023 | 12:50 PM

The Alberta government is moving laboratory services in the province from the privately-owned Dynalife to the Alberta Health Services-owned Alberta Precision Labs.

Health Minister Adriana LaGrange says a memorandum of understanding with the ownership of Dynalife to transfer all of their staff, operations and physical locations to Alberta Precision Labs (APL) by the end of 2023.

“Everyone will work together to plan for a successful and smooth transition of lab services to Alberta Precision Labs or APL to stabilize our lab system,” she says.

“This change is necessary to make sure Albertans can get their lab work done when and where they need it and get timely results.”

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Lab services in Medicine Hat, Calgary and the rest of southern Alberta switched from APL to DynaLife in February this year. Since then DynaLife has been plagued with problems and patients have routinely had long waits for appointments and to get results.

LaGrange says there should be no significant change to how people access lab services or how they book appointments and pre-existing appointments won’t be impacted.

She also says there will be no job loss for frontline staff.

AHS and APL are working to increase capacity further to help with long wait times.

LaGrange says negotiations for the transfer are still taking place and couldn’t comment on the cost to Albertans.

Luanne Metz, Alberta NDP Critic for Health (Emergency & Surgical Care), calls the UCP decision a “dangerous mismanagement of lab services for Albertans”.

“Danielle Smith’s incompetent handling of lab services has put Albertans in danger. I am constantly hearing from patients and frontline healthcare workers about extreme delays, and dangerous errors in lab work performed by DynaLife,” she said in a statement.

“DynaLife is the provider selected by the UCP after they destroyed Alberta’s publicly owned lab system in 2019 and embarked on a three-year dedicated drive to privatize its crucial work. Now that public lab has to bail out DynaLife. This is the UCP’s reckless experiment in privatization – all the money goes to a private operator, and all the risk lands on Alberta taxpayers and Alberta families.”

She claims that an NDP government would have already had a stable and efficient public lab system in operation today rather than a series of crises.

Executive Director of Friends of Medicare, Chris Gallaway, said their organization has always been vocally against the transition to DynaLIFE and is calling on the government to take accountability for “their central role in disrupting Albertans’ access to this essential health care service.”

–with files from rdnewsNOW