Smith moving ahead with promised AHS overhaul based on directions to health minister

Premier Danielle Smith has outlined her expectations for health care in Alberta in a mandate letter to the health minister.

Premier Danielle Smith has outlined her expectations for health care in Alberta in a mandate letter to the health minister.

In the letter, Smith outlined 11 commitments for Minister Jason Copping, including overhauling Alberta Health Services, improving senior care and addressing health-care staffing issues.

Copping said his first focus will be to improve EMS response times, decrease surgical backlogs and cut emergency room wait times, though he added that the United Conservative governmnt has already been working to improve in those areas.

Copping said the UCP also wants to localize health-related decisions and bring back a governance model like the one that was moved away from in 2008.

Things like purchasing, standards of care, funding and human resource policies make sense to be centralized, Copping said, but decisions on how to deliver care should be made locally.

"In my mandate letter, (what) the premier has indicated to me is to push down the operational decision-making to be able to ensure that we can drive innovation at the local level," he told CTV News Edmonton.

The letter also included a mandate to create a task force of medical professionals to review the last few years of health information and create recommendations on how to manage future pandemics.