For millions of Albertans, our first experiences of healthcare are with a family doctor. We went for routine checkups, to ask questions about our health, and to monitor chronic conditions. We built a trusting and valuable relationship over many years.
But today, access to family medicine is out of reach for hundreds of thousands of Alberta families. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the open hostility of the UCP to healthcare workers, have driven many healthcare professionals out of the province or out of their profession. Entire cities and whole regions of our province have been left without any family doctors accepting new patients.
Albertans are being denied the public healthcare promised to them as Canadians. The number of doctors accepting new patients through primary care networks dropped by half from 907 to 446 between May 2020 and January 2022. Entire communities have gone long periods with no doctors accepting new patients, including Lethbridge, Red Deer, Canmore, Banff, and Medicine Hat. The Canadian Institute of Health has collected extensive data and reports that over 650,000 Albertans do not have a primary health provider.
Without access to primary care, many Albertans are forced to leave medical conditions untreated until they reach a crisis point. Now, they need a ride in an ambulance to the emergency room, the single most expensive and overstretched way to deliver healthcare. Ask anyone who works in an Alberta hospital these days and they’ll tell you people are arriving sicker than ever before.
We need a new approach.
Our Alberta NDP vision for enhancing access to primary care centres around establishing Family Health Teams. By growing access to this team-based primary care model — including access to nurses, doctors, counsellors, or whichever professional is best suited to help — we also grow the number of people who can benefit from that care.
In the proposal that follows, Alberta’s NDP proposes introducing and rapidly expanding what we formally call Family Health Teams. We are confident that we can achieve an expansion and transformation of the primary care system by starting with supported steps. Namely, beginning with a Transition Fund will allow existing family practices to engage a broader range of health professionals and services. Evidence shows that supporting initial steps, in turn, will enable clinics and communities to manage an expansion and change as they also embrace the model of Family Health Teams.
Rebuilding Albertans’ access to healthcare in our communities is critical to ending the UCP chaos in our hospitals and ambulances, but more importantly, it’s an essential part of keeping Albertans of all ages in good physical and mental health - Rachel Notley
Our Proposal
Family Health Teams
A Family Health Team is made up of different types of healthcare professionals who provide primary care to a patient. Instead of a patient only having one doctor be responsible for them, a team can include multiple doctors working in partnership with other primary care providers and team members, including nurse practitioners, Registered and Licensed Practical Nurses, administrators, mental health therapists, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.
Teams would work in Family Health Clinics. This model goes far beyond “shared-services” and is based on the idea of a medical home, a physical place in your community where you go to manage your health, seek assistance from a variety of health professionals, and where people know you and care about you. The infrastructure of these buildings would have to support large interprofessional teams and be designed to support the best patient care. This could be done through renovating existing clinics or building entirely new ones.
Our commitment to integrated team-based care delivered in Family Health Clinics will mean that within 10 years, up to 1 million more Albertans will have access to a doctor within a day or two as part of family health clinics.
As a result, we hope to achieve the following goals:
- Better care and health outcomes for Albertans
- Care closer to home
- Access to a family doctor within a day or two
- Great places to work and care for patients
- Doctors who have time to focus more on medical care and less on administration
- Decreased pressure on Emergency Rooms, EMS, and hospitals and lower costs for the acute care system over time.
By relying on our Family Health Teams strategy, an Alberta NDP government will always make sure that you and your family can get the care you need, when you need it, close to home - Health Critic David Shepherd
Read our full report for more information on Family Team Based Care and our proposals on how we will implement our new strategy.