Ways to pressure the government and Alberta Health Services to reverse the plan to decommission 15 long-term care beds at the Sundre hospital were recently discussed.
Among the ideas brought up during a well-attended town meeting held Wednesday, April 6 at the Sundre Legion was to rally hundreds of people to march on the steps of the provincial legislature in protest.
But the Wildrose MLA for the Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre riding advised restraint in too quickly resorting to such a measure before Minister of Health Sarah Hoffman and AHS officials had at least been given an opportunity to fulfil the commitments that have been made. Those promises include finding alternate positions for affected staff and ensuring no jobs will be lost, keeping in Sundre all of the patients currently residing in the hospital's long-term care beds, and perhaps among chief concerns, the assurance the facility will remain open.
"The more vocal, the better," said Jason Nixon, encouraging people to continue writing letters and signing petitions.
But the health minister does seem to be very interested in working with her team to address the community's concerns, he said.
"So I would suggest that we continue with the steps that we're taking ó petitions, letters ó for the time being."
Of course if Hoffman doesn't work with the community, or ensure that AHS does, the MLA assured he would continue to escalate the matter politically.
"I'm not above taking the whole town up to the legislature if that's what we got to do," he said to applause.
Thanks to the community's outcry, there has already been a political impact on both the premier and the minister's office, he said.
"They're concerned. I have hope that they're going to work with us. I just want everybody to be assured that if they don't work with us, and quickly, that we aren't stopping and we will then start to lay out a plan forward. But we have to take the minister at her word right now, and she has said that she wants to work with us so we do want to give her the chance to be able to do that," he said to further applause.
Additionally, should the community eventually decide to rally at the legislature, it's crucial for a large turnout to pressure officials, as a small group won't send a strong message, he said.
"If you schedule a rally to the legislature, we got to show up. The worst thing that will happen is if we show up and it's just a really small group."
Although the legion wasn't quite bursting at the proverbial seams like it was when the building filled to standing capacity March 21 during the first public meeting with AHS officials, there was still a large turnout of roughly two hundred local and surrounding area residents who wanted answers. Many of them were vocal about their concerns.
"If our seniors need 24-hour nursing care, they will be in our acute care beds in the Sundre hospital until they are placed outside of our community," said Leah Hayes, a licensed practical nurse at the Sundre and Olds hospitals as well as at the Moose and Squirrel Medical Clinic.
"The seniors now in the Sundre hospital are being forced out of their beds. This move is detrimental to their health and well-being. Ten per cent of transferred long-term care patients will die within months of being moved," she said to a round of applause.
"We must continue to fight for our seniors."
The meeting was organized by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and attended by officials including Nixon and Mayor Terry Leslie as well as several representatives of AUPE and the Friends of Medicare.
"AUPE has become even more determined than ever to stand up for the rights and well-being of our members, of your community and all Albertans," said Glen Scott, AUPE vice-president.
"The crisis in seniors' care does not only affect health-care workers. Nearly every Albertan will come into close contact with the needs of continuing care services at some point in our lives, or the lives of our loved ones," he said.
The mayor, who is also a board member of Mountain View Seniors' Housing (MVSH), said the not-for-profit organization was equally caught off guard by a complete absence of consultation and that no one had seen any data to back up the decision to decommission the long-term care beds.
"We have to be crystal clear ó if you're going to close long-term care beds in this community, where is the data that says they're not needed," said Leslie.
"Long-term care is necessary to be offered at our hospital," he said, adding the new MVSH facility was only ever intended to accommodate up to supportive living including dementia care, but not long-term care. He also clarified that MVSH is a completely separate entity from AHS, and later discussed the differences between SL4 (supportive living), SL4-D (dementia care) and long-term care.
Although the supportive living beds will offer a level of nursing care not before available in Sundre, "long-term care is much more serious care ó patients who have medical conditions that might require 24-hour intervention. So the confusion between the long-term care and supportive living care is one that is kind of swirling for everybody. Never was there an intention for that building (the new MVSH facility) to have long-term care."
On the upside, some of the rooms at the new facility have been designed to accommodate long-term care. But that wasn't the original plan, which never accounted for the loss of the hospital's long-term care beds, he said.
AUPE organizers have launched a campaign to support the community's effort to save the hospital's long-term care beds, and anyone interested in adding his or her voice can visit www.savesundreltc.com.
"It was very clear to me that the message that my constituents were telling me first of all is that we do not trust Alberta Health Services in this process no more," said Nixon to applause.
"The second message that was clear is that this community wants and deserves ó and I can't even believe that we need to ask for it ó and that is a place at the table to determine what takes place at the hospital," he said.
During a meeting with the health minister and a delegation from Sundre held the day before the town meeting, Nixon said those messages were discussed as well as demands made that some form of long-term care remains in the community.
"It is absolutely unacceptable to the people in this region that anybody who needs care would have to leave their family and their friends and the community that they've lived in their entire life," he said to cheers.
"If they don't accept that arrangement, we're going to continue to fight the status quo that has been presented to us by Alberta Health Services as unacceptable. And second, we expect the NDP government that is in power right now to honour their commitments to Albertans, and that is not to cut frontline services, not to cut frontline jobs and to open long-term care beds, not to close them."
