Dear Members,
Today we release the inaugural AMA Report Card on the State of Health Care in Alberta—an overview of what patients are experiencing across the system. These benchmark measurements will be revisited in one year to track progress. The data is drawn from formal general population survey research, supplemented with insights from our 65,000-member PatientsFirst.ca community.
Despite ongoing system strain, your commitment to providing the best care that you can has been noticed. Albertans gave high marks to both family medicine and acute care specialists along with our health team colleagues. If you’ve ever wondered whether you make a difference—this survey offers a resounding yes.
Still, access remains a serious concern as everyone is working as hard as they can.
Only 54% of Albertans with a family doctor report they can usually get an appointment when needed. The 2023 Modernizing Alberta's Primary Health Care System report found just 40% can get same- or next-day access to primary care—a figure that has declined over five years. The trend is slowly improving, but we must stabilize family practices before we see meaningful gains. In acute care, 44% saw a specialist in the past year, but 42% rated the wait for an appointment as poor while 19% are currently on a specialist wait list.
With limited access to family physicians, walk-in clinics remain essential. While comprehensive, longitudinal care yields better outcomes and lower costs, episodic care continues to fill critical gaps. If we must continue to rely on them – or on new urgent care center models – we must also address systemic issues. We will have to ensure physicians working in these models have the time, resourcing, system connectivity and flexible compensation to support long-term sustainability and reduce care variation.
Rising emergency department use is another concern. 27% of Albertans visited an ED last year, with many of those visits made by unattached patients. The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates that 15% of Canadian ED visits are non-urgent. Here in Alberta, with primary care access limited and the additional load of a current public health crisis, patients are left waiting for care. It’s concerning to see that 18% of Alberta-registered patients left the ED without being seen—more than double the national average of 8.6% (CIHI).
As we release this report card, there are grounds for hope and for concern. We are committed to advancing meaningful, informed health care reform. This report reinforces physicians’ longstanding advocacy for measuring system performance. Setting goals and tracking outcomes is more vital than ever as the government restructures the system. To ensure accountability and transparency, we must monitor performance across local, corridor and provincial levels.
Sincerely,
Shelley Duggan, MD, FRCPC
President, Alberta Medical Association
P.S. We recently launched Report My Story, a text-based tool to share your daily experiences with us -- for information or to empower advocacy. If anything in this letter brings a patient or practice experience to mind, text a brief description to 587-401-9591 (24/7). Just save the number in your contacts for quick access. (To guard against bogus reports, AMA staff will work with submitters to verify membership.)