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Laurie in Debate

Bill 50: Health Professions Statutes Amendment Act, 2007 (No. 2)

Bill 50: Health Professions Statutes Amendment Act, 2007 (no. 2) debate in the 26th Legislature of Alberta, 3rd Session by Ms. Laurie Blakeman, MLA Edmonton-Centre

Alberta Hansard – December 04, 2007

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. It seems like just yesterday that I was talking about this bill. In fact, I think that, strictly speaking, it is the same day that I was talking about this bill in Committee of the Whole. I am willing to support this bill because it fits in with the Alberta Liberal policy of health workforce strategy. Essentially, we don’t have enough health professionals. We’re now facing a situation in a number of different areas that reflects what’s being anticipated in this bill, and that is that as we try and either train or offer residencies, which need to be supervised, or to offer competency exams to those coming with international medical degrees, in each case we need a qualified Alberta professional who is going to either do that additional training, oversee that residency, or complete that competency assessment, and we don’t have extra people around.

I have encouraged the government to go out and see what could be done to entice some retired professionals back in, almost in the same way that the teachers use retired teachers to come in and supervise student teachers. You know, the competency is still there. They’re not that far out of their profession. They understand all of the requirements. They’ve done it for a while, so they can see the pitfalls of it, and they earn a little bit of extra cash, so everybody’s happy. I think that’s what we have to look for to solve some of our other health workforce problems creatively.

Specific to what’s being anticipated in Bill 50, we have a situation where individuals were willing to conduct these competency examinations or assessments, but they did not want to be held liable if they passed somebody or gave them a satisfactory mark and that individual went out into the community and did harm, because number one in the medical profession is: first, do no harm. As we are aware, the medical profession also ends up with a lot of litigation against them is what I am trying to come around to there, Mr. Speaker. These individuals are not willing to sort of do a good deed by running these competency assessments and then get dinged with a lawsuit because someone that they had passed went out there and did something that harmed someone or killed someone and that they would be held liable. So we had a blockage, a hitch in the git- along of how we were going to move these forward.

Frankly, these international medical graduates are important to us in Alberta right now. They are often highly trained professionals, but they’re trained somewhere else. We need to come to an understanding. We have ways now of assessing their training, but we need to know what their hands-on competency is. That’s what these exams are meant to test and assess. So this is to expand the liability protection to those members of the health profession colleges who are willing to come out and do these competency assessments.

I think this is a small but simple yet effective step that the government has taken here in Bill 50. I’m very happy to support that move and urge my colleagues to support Bill 50 in third reading. Thank you.