New agency, new CEO: Recovery Alberta established with 10,000 staff

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Some 10,000 Alberta Health Services staffers became Recovery Alberta employees on Labour Day.

The brand-new agency, officially launched Monday, has a new CEO brought up from the ranks of AHS.

Kerry Bales heads up what is the first of four “pillar” agencies to be carved out of AHS in a dismantling started almost one year ago, empowered by the new Provincial Health Agencies Act.

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As former chief program officer for mental health and addiction and Correctional Health Services with AHS, Bales has seen much water under the health care bridge, serving as Central Zone chief zone officer for AHS from 2009 to 2019, and with the David Thompson Health Region in its various incarnations back to 1996 before that.

An agency by any other name

Interviewed Tuesday, the new CEO acknowledges there’s been some chatter around the use of the term “recovery” as an umbrella for mental health and addiction.

“I think it often causes a little bit of confusion, and people think about it generally in terms of recovery from addiction,” Bales said, adding that “recovery” has been used in both addiction and mental health contexts.

In mental health, “recovered” isn’t meant to suggest there aren’t some conditions that cannot be cured in the traditional sense.

“The term recovery is more about ensuring and supporting individuals, to be able to realize both their maximum function and wellness,” he said.

Dr. Luanne Metz is the Alberta NDP critic for health. Splitting mental health off from health is going back in time, she said.

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“The UCP is moving us away from an integrated health model by treating mental health as a separate condition.

“People do not come with either mental health or physical health issues. They are completely interrelated. This will harm the ability of Albertans to get the health care they need,” the Calgary-Varsity MLA said.

So why lump mental health and addiction into a single ministry and corresponding agency?

“I think there is a certain degree of overlap,” Bales said.

“When you’re working with populations needing supports in either the mental health or the addiction sector, often you’re looking at very similar or even the same populations,” he said.

Recovery Alberta allows for planning where commonalities might exist, he said.

One pillar up, three more to go

With the UCP government dismantling his former bailiwick, Alberta Health Services, maintaining integration in services is essential, Bales said.

“Even prior to the transition, the need to ensure that there are mechanisms and processes in place to have integration has really always been an ongoing priority within Alberta Health Services, even as one organization,” he said.

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“People might be accessing care through the continuing care system, through the mental health and addiction system, through Correctional Services, through inpatients, through acute care hospitals. That really hasn’t changed, and the need to continue to ensure that there’s mechanisms for that integration remain the same,” he said, pointing to areas like clinical documentation processes among the shared service supports for both corporate and clinical services.

With Recovery Alberta established as its own provincial health agency, a close partnership with the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction should help design solutions for service gaps and the future needs of Albertans, he said.

“It allows us to focus specifically on that piece, both from a service planning and a resource planning lens.”

Critical reception

The Official Opposition is critical of the break-up of AHS and the emergence of Recovery Alberta as part of “a costly downward spiral into chaos and uncertainty.”

Janet Eremenko, Alberta NDP critic for mental health and addiction, cited a toll on frontline health-care workers who worked in AHS one day and Recovery Alberta the next, who “have done their utmost to preserve workplace morale and service integrity, all in the face of a government that clearly underestimated the complexity of this undertaking.”

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The MLA for Calgary-Currie said the UCP government’s decision to dismantle the system, instead of improving it, incurred “tremendous costs and resulted in workforce attrition, and stress to workers, patients and their families.”

“All signs indicate that the co-ordination between Recovery Alberta and say, acute care, will worsen rather than improve. The need for patient advocacy and system navigation will become more difficult, not easier,” Eremenko said.

“Most importantly, the influence of private, sometimes for-profit, often out-of-province operators is greater than ever. Service delivery, operations, monitoring and evaluation, and now training of recovery coaches to be employed by Recovery Alberta is taking place with little transparency, standardization or external oversight.”

Challenges and priorities

While he said there were no new priorities relevant to the transition, Bales said it’s time to double down on addiction.

“I would say that right now we need to continue to have substantial effort and service investment in dealing with some of the addiction crisis and the opioid crisis. We’ve seen some recent success with numbers trending down over the last several months, but we want to make sure that we continue to be vigilant with that work,” he said.

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Bales identified “substantial” gaps to be filled for children and youth, “again with impacts of the pandemic, but also changing and highly stressful times,” he said.

Then there’s keeping pace with Alberta’s recent rapid demographic growth — a challenge for agencies across the board at a time when the province is growing by the number of residents of Red Deer plus Fort McMurray each year.

“Ensuring people have access to services in light of that growth. Overall service access is probably the other big priority,” he said.

jcarmichael@postmedia.com

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