One lurch forward, two steps back

As the first geriatric mental health patients move into Villa Caritas this week, it's an opportune time to look back at the Alberta Health Services bumbling that brought them there.
Villa Caritas was initially slated to be a long-term-care facility. The Caritas Health Group, now called Covenant Health, raised funds through its lotteries to build and operate the facility near the Misericordia Hospital, with financial help from the provincial government.
But, as we now all know, that plan went out the window when Alberta Health Services announced plans to close Alberta Hospital to save some money. When faced with public outrage over plans to transfer mental health patients to other city hospitals or release them into the community into non-existent care facilities, the health superboard decided to move only the geriatric patients and convert Villa Caritas into a mental health facility. That left the patients who were expecting to be moved to the new long-term care facility stranded, creating another uproar that still has not subsided.
In a province desperate for additional long-term care beds, the board was filling the new building with mental health patients. It was addressing the bed shortage by taking away new beds.
As this was going on, there was confusion over who should own the new facility. The provincial auditor general pointed out the building was constructed without any proper funding arrangements in place. The province had to put $8 million into upgrading the newly-constructed facility and providing the necessary monitoring equipment to make it safe and practical for mental health patients. That in turn delayed the opening of the facility from last fall to this week. Eventually, the province coughed up another $40 million for the building and agreed to reimburse Covenant Health for the money it had invested in it.
While there are pros and cons to having geriatric mental patients in the new facility, rather than at Alberta Hospital, the critical need for long-term care beds has been exacerbated. That has contributed to the backup of long-term care patients in acute care hospital beds, and ultimately to a crisis in emergency rooms.
Alberta Liberal Kevin Taft has fittingly dubbed this fiasco "management by lurch."
In his farewell speech, ousted Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett claimed Villa Caritas as one of his "achievements." And Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky would have you believe that somehow, Albertans are better off as a result of this calamity, and that everything is just fine.
But Auditor General Merwan Saher has blasted the planning for Villa Caritas as "very poor practice" and stressed in his annual report that it is "a practice that cannot be allowed to continue."
While he didn't find any evidence the poor practice was putting patients at risk, he did say it put the delivery of cost-efficient health care at risk.
After the last two tumultuous years of change and counter-change, some health-care critics might go so far as to say the Villa Caritas debacle is a microcosm of the province's health-care system. Albertans can be forgiven for hoping that's an exaggeration.
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