Unlike most health authorities, Calgary Health Region is finally facing the elephant in the room.  The fundamental problem of health care systems around the world is not rising costs or lack of money.  All the money in the world cannot buy what is really needed: more trained health-care practitioners.

Calgary Health Region officials say severe shortages in health-care workers will be the single biggest blockage to Albertans accessing health care — not a cash crunch.

"We've got the debate focused in the wrong place," said CHR CEO Jack Davis yesterday during an editorial board meeting with the [Calgary] Sun.

"It's not the cost of health care which is going to cause an issue of sustainability in health care, it's the lack of people that we have available to deliver health care," he said.

"The most significant choke point for health care going forward in the future is our ability to attract and retain health care providers."
. . .
"If you look at growth in an area like the Calgary Health Region and the demand that we have for new health providers and you layer on top of that the retiring health providers, we don't have a hope," said Davis.

"Even if our post secondary system starts to perform optimally, they're going to provide maybe half of our requirements so we need to compete globally," said Davis, who clearly prefers straight talk to bafflegab.

How bad is it?  CHR projects that, over the next five year, it should hire 6000 nurses, 1400 medical doctors, 3300 aides, and hundreds of other highly trained health professionals.  It's not going to happen: there won't be enough new graduates.

The only way to meet the foreseeable demands that will be placed on the system is to change the way health care is delivered, and that change needs to start now.  The CHR's proposal received no support from government, however, apparently due to the high expenditure involved.  Typical government myopia.

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