Medical Lab
Workers Say No! to Scrapping
New Public
Facilities
The question of who decides the direction of the
economy,
including health care and other public services has come to the
fore again with UCP leader Jason Kenney's announcement that he
would scrap the new publicly owned medical lab facilities to be
built in Edmonton. Kenney said a UCP government would "save" $650
million by scrapping the new facility, calling it a "bureaucratic
empire."
All Albertans have a stake and therefore the right to a
say
when it comes to handing over such a crucial public asset to
private interests. Dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced lab
workers and professionals should be on the front line when it
comes to decision-making regarding their sector of work.
 In 2015, Alberta Health
Services announced it would contract
an Australian company which started as a penny-stock mining
company to build a new lab in Edmonton to serve northern Alberta.
The decision was made after the group established to make
recommendations was ordered not to consider a public lab. The
ensuing decision was broadly opposed and the NDP government
reversed it through a process which permitted all options to be
considered.
Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA) President
Mike
Parker explained that this process concluded that a publicly
owned and operated province-wide laboratory operation was the
best, most efficient way to go. HSAA represents medical lab
staff.
"UCP leader Jason Kenney demonstrated an appalling
ignorance
over how health care works in his statement on laboratory
services in Alberta," Parker said."It's hard to believe that
someone with so little understanding wants to be trusted with
running our vital health-care service. Kenney's plans for lab
services reveals so many misconceptions, mistakes, misleading
statements and insults to health-care experts that it's hard to
know where to begin when analysing what he said...," Parker
added.
"He says that labs don't heal people. What on earth does
he
think we do in labs? We do the tests that provide the diagnosis
so people can be treated. Labs and the trusted health-care
experts who work in them are a vital part of the health-care
system. Without their skills, doctors are just guessing." Parker
also pointed out that the claims that a new lab are not needed
are ill-informed, and that lab facilities are stretched to the
breaking point. A new lab will have to be built, he pointed out.
The only issue is whether it will be based on the motive of
private profit or be publicly owned and operated.
 Facts show that far from
"saving money" Kenney is
proposing to
seize more of the social wealth to line the pockets of the rich.
Under the deal made with the private company Sonic in 2015, Sonic
would finance the land and building for a new lab. They would be
repaid the fixed investment of social wealth with interest and
guaranteed a profit from operating the enterprise. Alberta Health
Services would have to buy the facility and equipment if the
contract was not renewed after 15 years, even though Sonic would
have already been repaid its invested social wealth with
interest, not to speak of the operating profit, which is lost to
the public.
Scrapping the public lab would be the first step in
reviving
the schemes for a lab built with the motive of private profit.
Such schemes should be recognized for what they are -- a form of
corruption -- and banned by law. Instead, the value generated
within social programs and public services such as lab services
must stay within the public health care sector or be used to
enhance other public services and social and material
infrastructure and be available to protect the well-being of
health care workers.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number
13 - April 13, 2019
Article Link:
Medical
Lab
Workers
Say No! to Scrapping New Public Facilities
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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