I know I said we were taking a break during the month of December but last week I received a copy of a letter written by Lloyd and Linda Lovett on behalf of the Whitemud Citizens for Public Healthcare...
I know I said we were taking a break during the month of December but last week I received a copy of a letter written by Lloyd and Linda Lovett on behalf of the Whitemud Citizens for Public Healthcare that eloquently expressed the concerns that many of us have with the state of healthcare in this province.
Here it is.
The WCPH letter
“Most of us in Whitemud Citizens for Public Healthcare (WCPH) have invested a considerable part of our adult lives in health care and related vocations in the Province of Alberta. We are conscious of the co-operation, collaboration, and discourse by which health care in this province and in all of Canada has grown, improved, and adapted over many lifetimes. We are proud of the efficiencies and the universality of the public, egalitarian, single payer nature of it. Our goal is to encourage governments in their support of health care in Alberta through adequate funding and through support of recruitment, training, compensation and care of health care practitioners throughout the scope of professions, vocations and trades.
“We are also aware of the adaptive needs of public health care in Alberta as our population grows and ages. We know that events, often rare like the COVID-19 pandemic, test the system and provide us with opportunities to conduct informed, related system-wide evaluations of our infrastructure and practices, as well as those of the Government of Alberta. Without properly appointed and executed evaluations, confidence in the system will decline in every quarter.
“As we have implied, effective and universally available health care in Canada is a value that we uphold. We uphold it in Alberta and we uphold it as a program that exists organically with health care infrastructure in other provinces, all through discourse, collaboration, and co-operation. We are then dismayed whenever fighting and over-the-top partisanship change health care issues into political issues. For example, the most recent adaptation proposals, supposedly to meet present needs, have been manifest more as careless reorganization into packages meant for sale to private health care, even as they risk increased costs and decreased effectiveness for Albertans.
“And, for example, we are dismayed that the recent so-called evaluation of government administration of the health care system during COVID-19 has become a highly partisan report. The report’s writer offers it to the Conservative Party of Canada for use against their political opponents.
“A century ago in 1924 diphtheria became a reportable notifiable disease throughout Canada. That year 9,057 cases were reported, the highest number ever reported in Canada. In January of 1929, in an open cockpit aircraft, legendary bush pilot and World War 1 fighter pilot Wop May, with Vic Horner, flew diphtheria serum/vaccine 800 km from Edmonton to Fort Vermillion, virtually saving that community and surrounding Indigenous communities.
“There are still some cases of that particular disease reported around the world, though very few in Canada. The tremendous success in reduction of cases by immunization, especially in Canada, was achieved through collaboration, co-operation, discourse, and courage, in health care supported by government. It was not achieved by fighting between governments, and not by overheated partisanship.”
[Signed] Linda and Lloyd Lovatt on behalf of The Whitemud Citizens for Public Health, Edmonton”
Why I’m sharing this letter
WCPH was formed in 2009 in response to the efforts of the Stelmach government to “fix” public health. Now 14 years later we’re even worse off than we were before. As the nurse who texted into Danielle Smith’s PR show said, “We don’t need you to burn down the house. We need you to build it up.”
It’s time for Albertans to stand up for our publicly funded and publicly delivered healthcare system. One way to do that is to support groups like WCPH. You can find out more about WCPH here. https://www.facebook.com/groups/247338238324