The provincial government has established 14 new regional advisory councils to help provide input in improving health care locally.
Adriana LaGrange, the Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services, says it’s important to have a lot of representation from the province’s rural areas.
“We know that we often have issues in recruitment and retainment of health care professionals across our rural and remote areas of the province and we want to make sure that changes. Part of that is making sure that we hear the voices from rural and remote. It was very important to me when we had the in-person engagements that we did cover the whole province.”
Of those 14 regional councils, three of them are covering different parts of northwestern Alberta, with several local health care workers, community leaders and municipal politicians involved.
LaGrange says these advisory councils can help with attracting and retaining doctors.
“We can help our healthcare professionals, whether its doctors or nurses or other specialists or other professionals that come into our rural and remote communities, to feel at home in those communities and become part of the community, then they want to stay. We’re seeing more and more communities reach out with innovative ways of making sure that they do reach out to their healthcare professionals and make them feel welcome.”
LaGrange says the goal is to help make the health system more responsive, accessible and better able to meet the needs of Albertans.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
