Hospital-based decision making raises privatization fears, hope for efficiencies – CBC
Premier Danielle Smith promised to shift who makes hiring and purchasing choices
Jun 19, 2025
The Alberta premier’s announcement of her intent to restore local decision making to public health facilities is highlighting a philosophical divide in how to best manage the province’s stretched health budget.
Premier Danielle Smith published a video online Tuesday, saying decisions about hiring health-care workers or replacing hospital furniture belong with individual health centres, not Alberta Health Services (AHS) managers.
“Soon, each facility will have an empowered leadership team supporting our sites, responsible for hiring, managing resources, and solving problems without sending every request into the vortex,” Smith said in the video.
The shift is part of a massive restructuring of health-care in the province, in which the government has broken the oversight of care into four new agencies and stripped AHS of decision-making power.
