New Health Minister says ‘he is up to the task’

Alberta’s new Health Minister held his first press conference from Edmonton on Friday and says he will deal with the challenges as they come.

Stephen Mandel was appointed Minister of Health by Premier Jim Prentice earlier this week.

“It’s been really an exciting week and I can’t tell you the number of people I know who have come up to me and talked about the leadership and finally that the party’s going in the right direction and the province is going in the right direction, that’s because of Premier Prentice,” said Mandel.

Mandel does not hold a seat in the legislature but politics are not new to him. He was Mayor of Edmonton from 2004 to 2013 and says there is no problem with the optics.

“It’s not like we’re going to wait seven or eight years to get elected.  We’ll go ahead as soon as possible and do what we need to do and hopefully we’re successful and if we’re not we’ll have to worry about those consequences then,” he said.

The portfolio is one of the most difficult to manage and Mandel says he has a great team to help him out.

“Anything you do, it’s about trying to break it down into some small common denominators. I think if you look at Alberta Health Services and Alberta Health and this mammoth organization, you’d probably go, oh my God no, but if you start looking at it in smaller chunks and get a sense of what you need to do in each of those chunks, I think you can deal with it more effectively, more efficiently, and then maybe at the end of the day, accomplish what you set out to do. Let’s be fair, I’m not going to change the entire world or totally renovate it by tomorrow morning but we’ll do things over the next little while which we hope will make significant steps to reaching our goals which the premier set out for us,” said Mandel.

He is originally from Windsor, Ontario but has lived in Alberta for over 40 years and says the province has a great health care system.

“You get sick in Alberta, you get taken care of. That doesn’t mean there’s not some mistakes, there’s not some problems but if you’re in the system, you’re taken care of.”

He says he thinks there is a lot of frustration at the delivery level and that Albertans told him better communication and some streamlining of the system is needed.

“We need to have proper procedures in place and standards and the kinds of thing that allow our physicians to be successful and to deal with the problems we face, but there’s no reason to allow us to say we can spend the kind of money that we’re been spending and not have the finest system in the country, or really in the world. We should not strive for mediocrity, we should strive for as close to perfection as we can.”

He says the current system should be improved and not scrapped so people feel more comfortable with it and that it is unacceptable that people have to wait for months to get some surgeries.

He says Alberta Health Services needs to address questions about why it is taking so long and what the problems are and that they need to find ways to take pressure off the system.