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Healthcare rally next month in Red Deer to focus on critical shortages

Aug 24, 2017 | 1:16 PM

Shortages at Red Deer Regional Hospital are still critical issues facing Central Albertans, and a health care rally next month will continue bringing exposure to the issue.

The rally is being held on September 10 from 2:30 – 5 p.m. in the parking lot of the Memorial Centre. Speeches will take place at 4 p.m.

Issues surrounding available hospital beds and operating rooms at the hospital were first identified in 2014 and have been deemed high priority since then. Doctors say the province has yet to do anything about it.

Dr. Paul Hardy, general surgeon, said he feels that many basic services are lacking in volume in Red Deer, forcing patients to go to Edmonton and Calgary for simple things like gallbladder and hernia surgeries.

“I think the current government wants care closer to home, but with the current flow of patients [in Red Deer] despite the fact that people are going to Edmonton and Calgary, we still have longer waits for these surgeries,” Hardy said Thursday.

He added that other services being strained in Red Deer include cancer surgeries and total join replacement surgeries. Others including peritoneal dialysis catheters or fistulas for dialysis are entirely unavailable in the city.

“There are some services that we don’t have that would be very easy to do in Red Deer but we just don’t have the infrastructure. [There] are procedures that could easily be done in Red Deer but because of operating room time we can’t expand.”

 Over the last five years Hardy said between 12,000 and 13,000 surgeries have been done at Red Deer Regional. In the past five years, thanks to a new program, 5,000 additional procedures have been done in Olds, Stettler and Innisfail.

“It’s a new program [where the surgeons travel] and we are kind of maxed out because you can’t move complex surgeries.”

The rally next month will look at some of the new planning and information that has come to light regarding the hospital.

After the needs assessment study completed by Alberta Health Services in 2014, it is still identified that the hospital needs three more operating rooms, 96 more inpatient beds and 18 additional emergency room stretchers.

“We were on the urgent priority list in 2015 and then in 2016, in the fall, we were dropped off the list with not much of an explanation or explanations we still don’t understand,” Hardy noted.

Following a state of the hospital address this past February, Hardy said people were shocked to find out about the lack of change over the last 20 years, including the fact that the hospital hasn’t seen a new hospital bed in 20 years.

“This [rally] is an update from that time because we’ve done some planning and we want the public to stay involved.”

Hardy said the event will have live music, food trucks, and speakers who should help shed some light on what could be called a crisis and how the public can help simply by remaining engaged in the issue.