Alberta rolls out new primary care agency

Alberta now has a new provincial health agency to help residents access primary care services, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange announced on Tuesday.

The organization, called Primary Care Alberta, will be "a modern, more responsive and unified health-care system," officials said.

"What this means for Albertans is they will finally have an agency that is dedicated to making sure their primary health-care needs are met," LaGrange said.

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Primary Care Alberta is one of four agencies created by the UCP government to manage the province's health-care system and take over for Alberta Health Services (AHS).

The other agencies include acute care, continuing care and mental health and addiction.

LaGrange said the decision to create the agency came from its Modernizing Alberta's Primary Care System initiative, which showed that Alberta needs oversight for primary care.

"To have the ability to have oversight for primary care is essential to moving things forward," she said.

Dr. Kim Simmonds, the current assistant deputy minister of strategic planning and performance at Alberta Health, has been appointed the CEO of the new organization.

"She has experience working with clinicians and understands the need for data and evidence-based decision making when delivering health care to Albertans no matter where they live," LaGrange said.

Simmonds said she is excited about opportunity and the government's focus on improving health care for Albertans.

"Primary care is the foundation of a solid health-care system," she said. "It is the first point of contact that Albertans have when they need health care."

One of Simmonds' responsibilities as CEO will be make sure "the right resources" are in place to achieve the government's goals.

"Really focused on making sure that we have access across the whole province," LaGrange said.

Simmonds' work will still be supported by the "multi-pronged approach" to address some of the other issues facing Alberta's health-care system, such as a recruitment drive for more physicians.

"Over 280 family practitioners have moved or are in the process of moving to Alberta that have registered with the College of Physicians and Surgeons just in the last year alone," LaGrange said.

She said it would be "premature" to say if any job losses would occur in the change over from the existing AHS framework for primary care to this new agency.

"Dr. Simmonds has a lot of work ahead of her to set up the agency and make sure she's connected to the primary care networks, with the primary care clinics that are operating across the province, there's just a lot of work ahead of her."

Province exploring homeopathic treatment coverage

As Alberta continues to revamp its health-care system, the provincial government is again discussing whether homeopathy and other alternative medicine should be covered.

"I know that a lot of Albertans value the services that they get from homeopaths, but there needs to be a lot more discussion," said LaGrange about whether the government could cover alternative treatments.

"It's up to Minister LaGrange to do a full assessment of what our system covers," said Premier Danielle Smith when asked Tuesday.

"We want to be able to make sure that we're covering the same levels of care that are happening in other provinces. So that work is ongoing," she added.

Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health law and science at the University of Alberta, is critical of the province even considering spending public money on homeopathy.

"It is incredibly frustrating that in this time of crisis with our health-care system, that they're wasting even a second of time to consider the provision and the funding of homeopathy," Caulfield said.

"We're not going to fix the grave problems we have with our health care system with pseudoscience and magical thinking."