Talk about putting the cart before the horse. It's bad enough Alberta Health Services admitted to having failed to adequately communicate to the community and region its intentions to close the Sundre Hospital and Care Centre's 15 long-term care beds.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
It's bad enough Alberta Health Services admitted to having failed to adequately communicate to the community and region its intentions to close the Sundre Hospital and Care Centre's 15 long-term care beds.
On Monday, March 21at the Sundre Legion, brave officials faced a proverbial firing squad of more than 300 frustrated people during a public meeting organized by MLA Jason Nixon and his staff. That's when Kerry Bales, chief zone officer, central zone for AHS, confessed there had been a communication failure.
"There's no picking on Sundre whatsoever. First and foremost, what we've probably done is a very poor job of communicating with folks," he said.
But adding insult to injury, officials have also said there are no concrete plans for the space that will become vacant when the patients are relocated to the new multi-million dollar Mountain View Seniors' Housing campus of care this summer.
"The things we are going to be looking at is what can we utilize that space for that actually helps to support the current services that are at the site," said Bales.
"There are some things that we have to do practically speaking in order to maintain lab services in this hospital. We have to meet some national accreditation standards, which require some space. That's going to be one of the things that we're going to be trying to look at."
So at least there's one idea for what the space might be used for. Lab services are obviously very important. But at this stage, it's a far cry from being a comprehensive plan for the future use of the space that can be enacted as soon as the space becomes available.
AHS has said the plan is to consult with the community to determine what it desires, which almost seems redundant because residents have made it clear what they want — the long-term care beds.
Let us pretend for a moment, however, that people in the area would have been willing to let the beds go while working and consulting with AHS officials to come up with plans for the future.
That certainly sounds like a process that should have been engaged long before officials announced the closure of the 15 long-term care beds.
Had the community been consulted well ahead of the announcement to decommission the beds, perhaps plans might already have been in place to utilize the space that will become vacant and thus minimizing the amount of time it will idly sit unused, waiting for a decision to be made.
— Simon Ducatel, Round Up editor
