News about laboratory services at the Westlock Healthcare Centre being cut comes as a major blow to the community of Westlock.
We recently learned Alberta Health Services will be transferring lab services from Westlock to DynaLIFE Dx, a private health care company. As a result, testing for chlamydia, gonorrhoea and Pap smears, as well as monitoring insulin in diabetics and pregnancy testing, are effectively being taken away.
Samples will still be collected locally after June, but will be sent to labs in Edmonton or Calgary, further delaying patients’ test results by roughly one or two days.
That’s not a huge impact on patients, although it’s always concerning whenever there’s any kind of delay involved in patients receiving prompt information about their test results.
Losing lab services could devastate the lives of many. If a woman suffers a miscarriage and doctors needed to monitor hemoglobin levels regularly or offer a blood transfusion, sending blood cultures away to an Edmonton-based lab could pose a huge risk.
However, another big issue is the loss of jobs. As mayor Bruce Lennon pointed out, these jobs had to be filled by people with a certain level of education and are typically not from this area, so they relocated here for work.
The loss of these jobs means the loss of these residents, who spent money in this community simply by virtue of staying here.
He also pointed out the short-term savings from not spending money to upgrade the Westlock hospital would far outweigh the long-term savings of transferring these services to a private company.
If the goal here is to actually save money, why can’t AHS provide some kind of total representation of what the projected savings could be?
Having heard about the loss of laboratory services, MLA Maureen Kubinec is now working on engaging health minister Fred Horne in a conversation regarding what these changes mean for the community.
It will be important for our local politicians and our MLA to continue pressing the province and AHS on these issues. At the very least, we need to force some kind of moratorium here, if not a total reversal of this decision.
