Alberta Health Services wants private facility to cut wait times for weight-loss surgery

Alberta Health Services wants to set up a private surgical facility in Edmonton to tackle a lengthy wait-list for weight-loss surgeries. 

There are 950 people on a wait-list for bariatric procedures, The majority of patients are in the Edmonton zone of AHS, which delivers health services across the province.

The initiative is part of the Alberta Surgical Initiative launched by the UCP government in 2019.

The province wants to outsource procedures like knee, hip and cataract surgeries to private providers or chartered surgical facilities. Patients have their costs covered by Alberta Health but the contracts are with for-profit corporations. 

According to a request for proposals, Alberta Health Services is offering a proponent an annual minimum of 350 gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy surgeries. Other procedures such as endoscopy and removal of excess skin due to weight loss may eventually be performed at the private facility.

Charlotte Taillon, press secretary for Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, said in an email to CBC said private facilities are required to follow AHS policies and procedures to ensure the safety of patients.

"When an Alberta patient is referred for surgery, AHS schedules all publicly funded surgeries through its system and determines whether a surgery will be performed at a hospital, or a chartered surgical facility based on several factors including the type of surgery," Taillon wrote in the statement.

"It's about making more operating rooms available so Albertans can get their surgeries sooner."

Wait-list hard on patients

The delay is causing hardship for patients who face a long wait before they can even get on the list for surgery. 

Dr. Sarah Chapelsky, an obesity specialist in Edmonton, said patients can wait two years to get accepted into an obesity clinic after receiving a referral from a family doctor. 

Once they get into the program, patients work with doctors who may try other treatment options before getting them on the surgery wait-list. 

"It's going to be at least three years probably, right now, from the time that you're referred by your family physician to have bariatric surgery up until you actually have surgery," Chapelsky said.

"Certainly for some patients, it's actually longer."

Chapelsky said some patients have seen their obesity-related chronic conditions worsen while they sit on the wait-list. Others face more significant consequences. 

"We do see patients who, while they're waiting for bariatric surgery, are going to maybe run into new health problems that are so serious that maybe they're not a candidate for bariatric surgery anymore," she said. "And that's always really tragic when that happens."

Chapelsky declined to comment on whether a chartered surgical facility could help her patients. 

Alberta-based advocacy group Friends of Medicare wants AHS to withdraw the request for proposals. 

Executive director Chris Gallaway said a lack of operating rooms isn't contributing to the long wait-list. It's a shortage of medical staff, he said.

Gallaway said chartered surgical facilities that do hip and knee surgeries haven't cut wait times.

"If the issue is truly operating-room space, we could build operating rooms publicly and staff them publicly," he said. "This is a choice by the government not to do that."