The UCP Government expelled the entire Board of Alberta Health Services for the second time since Danielle Smith became Prime Minister, the last step in the mass restructuring of the province’s health system.
With the changes announced Friday by the government press release, Andre Tremblay will serve as an official administrator, a person’s board of directors, while serving as an interim CEO of Alberta Health Services and The Deputy Minister of the Provincial Ministry of Health.
The last change in AHS’s leadership occurs as the Smith government continues to decrease the unique role that the agency has long had in the management of medical care of all types of Alberta.
Earlier this week, the Government announced the creation of Authed Living Alberta, the fourth and last new Crown Corporation Corporation to assume the role of medical care management that had maintained singularly.
It is becoming four separate agencies: acute care (hospital supervision), primary care, long -term and continuous care, and mental health and addictions. However, AHS will remain as manager of the 106 hospitals of the Alberta government.
The office of the Minister of Health, Adriana Lagrange, said she was not available for an interview, since she is on her way to Washington to attend the national prayer breakfast next week with other ministers. In a written statement, his office suggested that the termination of the Board should give a government supervision of AHS, an agency of arm length.
“This is a critical moment in our efforts to renounce as AHS continues to transition to a provider of provision of services in the hospital, so it is essential that we remain extremely agile to address any problem that arises,” said the Office of the Minister of Health.
“We believe that this is best achieved by increasing government supervision and participation in the liquidation of AHS as a regional health authority and supervising its final transition to a service provider.
This movement will also give Lagrange and his ministry a more direct hand to select a new permanent CEO of the hospitals agency, a role that the Board had begun after CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos departed in early January.
Friday’s move was abrupt; A brief meeting of the board scheduled for the afternoon disappeared from the AHS website around lunch time.
But it is similar to a mass table by Smith at the end of 2022, shortly after she became Premier. Then, the province appointed John Cowell as the official AHS administrator, to supervise some changes before the dismantling of four parts of AHS was announced in 2023.
Braden Manns, a former AHS executive, said that the Smith government has been too interested and active in the remodeling of leadership ranks, when that was not what the province’s medical attention has been sick in a period of shortage in a period of shortage of frustrating workers and waiting times for patients.
“There has been no attention to get a better first -line attention,” he said in an interview. “It’s about reorganizing the cover chairs. And again, the organizational structure was never the problem.”
Manns, who was an associated medical director and interim vice president, sees a problem with the report lines. The CEO of Ahs is supposed to respond to its board, and now that is a person.
He also took Manns by surprise that Smith’s government would want more hand in the management of AHS. Three members of the Board of seven people were the current deputy ministers within the Government (including Tremblay) and a room was Lyle Oberg, a former Tory Cabinet Minister with political ties with Prime Minister Smith.
Tremblay, the man who will juggle with multiple roles on the ahs of $ 16.4 and 88,000 employees, as well as the personnel of more than 1,100 in the Alberta Ministry of Health, sent a memorandum of all personnel about the changes imposed by the Government .
“As an official administrator, along with my duties such as Deputy Minister of Health and Interim President and CEO of Albert Acute care and an operator hospital, “he wrote to AHS staff.
The background of the new leader of AHS are in the Civil Service of the Government, instead of the Health Administration. According to his biography of the Government, Tremblay served as a senior bureaucrat by the Alberta Transport, Agriculture and Education Ministries before being dragged to Alberta Health in June 2023, when Lagrange became minister. He had served the last decade in a less senior role in the ministry that supervises AHS and establishes the health policy.
Cowell, the administrator before Tremblay, had spent much of his career in health policy, including another season in the same decade in the same role of AHS when the conservative government of the time had fired the entire Board of the Agency.
“No one is asking for dismantling, massive shots, chaos and new logos,” said Alberta Ndp Sarah Hoffman’s health criticism in a statement. “We all deserve public health care that is there when and where we need it.”
