Last week the provincial government announced it had reached a tentative seven-year agreement with the Alberta Medical Association after a bitter period of soured negotiations.
If the deal pans out the way things appear in the memorandum of understanding released April 15, the Innisfail health-care system would get a much-needed injection of stability that could help bring new doctors to town, according to a local physician.
“Stability is huge for us in terms of planning and attracting physicians,” said Gerald Miller, a doctor at the Medical Clinic, which is currently down one physician after Dr. Meyer Schoeman moved to Calgary recently. “I have to see the details. If the details are what they are in the memorandum, I would support it.”
The contract includes a three-year pay freeze, mirroring the deal struck with teachers in March, which would be retroactive to 2011. Under the plan doctors will get a 2.5 per cent increase starting in 2014 for two years and then a cost of living increase starting in 2016 for two years.
The deal also includes support for the electronic medical records plan, a one-time lump-sum payment of $68 million “to address various financial challenges faced by physician practices,” and a commitment to the retention bonus program, among other goodies.
“I think that will help keep physicians,” Miller said of the retention bonus support. “It keeps people here. It keeps them from moving to other provinces.”
Even though there are similarities between details in the education contract and the pending agreement with doctors, it's important not to compare them directly, he added.
“They have a three-year freeze with us just like they had a three-year freeze with the teachers,” he said, noting doctors have overhead costs that have made things tighter. “Our costs have been going up three per cent, three-and-a-half per cent every year for the past two years.”
Alison Redford's Conservatives moved away from the negotiation table after promising an agreement in principle with doctors during an election many pollsters predicted she'd lose.
Miller said doctors understand the jam the government is in and thinks the new deal could mean Innisfail might be able to form a primary care network, a new form of which was embraced under the memorandum of understanding.
“Most communities have formed them,” Miller said. “We certainly were pursuing it and then all this instability and controversy came along and people stepped back and said, ‘Lets see what happens.'”
