Alberta Health Services President/CEO Stephen Duckett, the media, and a cookie!
video from CTV Edmonton.
Stephen Duckett made $744,000 last year. $595,000 base salary and $76,619 in performance bonuses .
Related:
Today AHS announced a plan to improve the current 'emergency room crisis' which in reality is just the 2007 plan re-announced. Moving people from the ER into hallways or 3 beds to a 2 bed room etc on other hospital wards is already common practice in many hospitals in Alberta and has been since 2007.
The new (old) plan may make a nice sound bite ( at least better than the CEO's) and it might keep the masses of their backs for a while, but I see nothing in it that is really going to help the current situation in our hospitals.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
That's one expensive cookie!
How can something so simple be so hard to do?
It all boils down to political cowardice and incompetence. They just aren’t willing to stand before the electorate and tell them they have to increase taxes to pay for an adequate health care system. Nor are they going to stand up to all the leftards and tell them it’s “times up” for this second rate socialist health care system.
It’s more about politics and less about health care, to those who control our system.
That is why we need, at the very least, a fully functioning, private health care system.
That is the solution.
What an arrogant prick. For 3/4 of a million a year one had better be prepared to answer some tough questions.
The next election can't come soon enough.
How are salaries or bonuses set for these so called professionals.
This guy is way overpaid.
So they are going to make the conditions in the non-emergency part of the hospital even worse than they are now and shove increasingly sicker people home without adequate support. That's an improvement?
Wanna make a wager that it was a tax payer paid for cookie and not one from home? Sucker bet.
This little plan solves nothing. It gives temporary relief to the ER by off-loading the work to the already full wards. (if the wards were not full there would be no problem in ER). Moving from one pile to the other is just a smoke and mirror exercise to fool the public into thinking they are doing something.
I don't use the "S" word lightly - But the recent ER situation here in Alberta (especially Calgary) is getting just plain stupid what with insane 20 hour ER wait times.
Everyone (politicians included) is blinded, distracted and mesmerized by the bright light shining in their eyes. Progressives and socialists have demonized any private provisioning as two-tier care which is patently false and misleading.
I would characterize AHC as a bureaucratic nightmare, with some 40,000 employees and top heavy with supervisory and administrative staff. Likely some 20% percent of employees are supervisors and/or administrators.Few, if any have hands-on proven health care delivery experience.Fifteen percent of hospital employees are managers obsessed with measurement and "parameterization." More MBA weasel words and double-talk. Bull-shit bingo comes to mind. This is a massive and bloated bureaucracy that has soundly demonstrated that they can never effectively ensure the timely delivery of health care .
What’s wrong with Alberta's government sponsored and monopolistic health care system can be remedied only with bold, dramatic and long overdue reform to restore any semblance of dignity and humanity to the health care consumer.
As it is now costs are spiraling out of control and efficiency is nothing short of appalling.
Historically, government=bloated self-serving bureaucracy, monopoly=inefficiency and high prices - combine the two and the worst possible outcome is an absolute certainty.
In my opinion Alberta desperately needs to adopt a pragmatic hybrid approach wherein competition unfettered by bureaucratic regulation will drive innovation and efficiency to reduce health care costs while improving the system for all.
Segway - Under the Klein regime Calgary lost the best trauma/ICU team in Canada when the General Hospital was blown up to make way for real estate carpet baggers. And the Holy Cross hospital was sold to insider investors for a pittance while disbanding one of the best cardiac units in the province.
Bottom line - Get the politicians the hell out of health care!
Some other opinions:
http://www.chrislabossiere.com/chrislabossiere/2010/11/20/my-politically-naive-root-cause-analysis-of-the-cookie-crisi.html
Can we get Neil MacDonald to launch an full investigative report on behalf of the CBC to determine if the cookie was expensed.
After watching this video I am forced to go get a Chips Ahoy chocolate cookie myself.
You Albertans are a funny bunch!
Heard on the evening news that he is gone. Is that true.
Stephen Duckett, head of Alberta’s health board, loses job
Josh Wingrove
Edmonton— Globe and Mail Update
Published Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010 7:05PM EST
Last updated Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010 9:44PM EST
Imagine, not one of this super board had any experience in health care or running a hospital.
No wonder things are in such a mess.
Go back to local hospital boards.
It would be much cheaper and better service given.
Glen Becks, theblaze.com picked up this story yesterday.
Post a Comment