Airdrie City Hospital... Time To Get Started

Although the school shortage in Airdrie and Chestermere is the most pressing infrastructure need for our constituency at present, there is another issue we need to begin focusing our efforts on. It involves the need for emergency care and other hospital services in the City of Airdrie.

Airdrie is the largest city in Alberta, and one of the largest in Canada, without an emergency room or hospital. If you want rage-induced heartburn just Wikipedia the 'List of hospitals in Alberta' to see the dozens of small towns have what we so unjustly lack. With our city's growth predicted to reach roughly 70,000 within 15 years, it is critical to begin planning for a full service hospital with a functioning emergency room to be completed within the next decade.

In pursuit of this endeavor, Mayor Peter Brown and I are assembling an 'Airdrie Health Care Working Group' which will meet beginning in March. The purpose of this group will be to bring together a cross section of locally elected officials, health professionals, business leaders and concerned citizens for the purpose of planning for the future health care needs of our Airdrie area residents.

Obviously, a hospital won't be built in Airdrie overnight. Budgets are tight and we have a horribly over-centralized Health Superboard that has historically been hostile to the local needs of our community (the loss of our integrated ambulance service being the most egregious example).

However, with the Wildrose and now multiple PC leadership candidates calling for the Superboard to be disbanded, it is very likely health care delivery will be decentralizing to the community-level in the not-too-distant future. The Wildrose Party push to see competitive delivery of publicly funded services will likely result in the injection of some much needed money into local health infrastructure post Election 2012. And even under the current Superboard's ineffective oversight, there are still ways in which we can plan and pool our resources as a community to attract and help pay for the additional health professionals and medical equipment necessary to expanding local health services.

There is a long road ahead of us before we achieve the goal of an Airdrie City Hospital...but the time has come to get started.