Anyone who’s been through a company restructuring knows it’s a rollercoaster—worrying about job security, new bosses, or shifting responsibilities. But usually, once the dust settles, life goes on.
Imagine working for a company that’s cycled through five CEOs in just over two years. Also, the entire board of directors has been fired twice. Then, the company is split into four (or is it five or six?) separate entities, and the decision-makers behind it all are facing corruption allegations. Sounds like chaos, right?
That’s the reality for Alberta Health Services (AHS) employees. With constant leadership shake-ups, confusing restructuring, and corruption investigations by the auditor general and the RCMP, we wanted to check how frontline workers are holding up.
Who Do I Work For?
Many AHS employees are no longer technically working for AHS; instead, they have been or will be transferred to one of four new agencies: Primary Care Alberta (PCA), Recovery Alberta (RA), Acute Care Alberta (ACA), and Assisted Living Alberta (ALA).
Two of these—Primary Care and Recovery—are already in operation. Acute Care Alberta will be fully functional on April 1, followed by Assisted Living Alberta, officially becoming a legal entity that same day.
But the shake-up doesn’t stop there. The Alberta government is also creating a centralized Shared Services Agency (SSA) that is responsible for human resources and IT services across the entire healthcare system.
And what’s left of AHS? It will continue to exist—but only as a service provider overseeing Alberta’s 106 government-owned hospitals.
Confused?
So are AHS workers.
One employee voiced their frustration on the AHS Employees Reddit thread:
“I’m confused by all this AHS transfer stuff. Are Frontline staff like nurses, admin, HCA’s [healthcare aides] moving to ACA? Or are we still falling under AHS?”
Another poster captured the deep sense of loss and uncertainty surrounding the changes:
“Feeling super demoralized, mad and sad about having to leave AHS. Especially knowing how we all now report to GOA [Government of Alberta] and Marlaina [Premier Smith], who believes AHS has Albertans ‘under our thumbs’ (press conference last week). I have always loved working in health, and believed wholeheartedly in what I was doing and how my work serves my community. Now I feel I will be at the whim of the (corrupted?) GOA, being forced to toe the line and shut up or else. We have been told any dissenters will be fired, so you can’t even ask reasonable questions that would have been expected as a somewhat intelligent professional. We can’t use social media without fear. And our own bosses apparently hate us. So easy for others to say just quit and find another job. I’ve made my career of 20 years to be centered around helping my community, and as a single person, I have relied on the idea of a pension to help me retire. Quitting seems like a black hole. Anyone else? Anyone with anything positive to say to give me any hope? So demoralized!”
The replies that followed echoed the same themes: confusion, demoralization, but also solidarity.
One response encouraged workers to stick together:
“We all need to build our workplace community and support one another. Lunch together. Go for short walks together. Join the communities that are holding rallies. Yes, it is okay to wear a mask at these events to protect your privacy and job.”
Are these isolated voices of dissent, or do they reflect a broader crisis within Alberta’s healthcare workforce? To find out, we spoke directly with nurses working on the ground.
From the Frontlines
We talked to three AHS frontline employees and all three are as confused and demoralized as the workers posting in the Reddit thread. The response below sums up the nurses’ frustration.
“There’s confusion at work. Staff have no idea what’s going on, and rumours abound. We’re tired of seeing this constant chaos since Ms. Smith became premier. They keep sending out all these polls and surveys for staff to fill out, and I do know the majority of feedback they receive has not been positive. They will send a survey out then ignore the staff feedback on how to improve. These constant changes are negatively impacting staff morale.”
We asked if staff were kept abreast of AHS’s structural changes and how the changes would affect them, we were told:
“They just seemed to be making things up as they went along, with no communication with staff. And then next thing you know, you are working for a different agency!”
“There has been very little real communication to AHS staff on how all this is all going to pan out. They are having online town hall meetings, but those are during the busiest part of the morning, so most staff don’t/can’t attend. There’s zero communication between AHS execs and frontline staff.”
When asked if the restructuring made sense from an operational and efficiency point of view, the responses were not favourable to the government’s plans.
“What a waste of money and resources. Now we have four different agencies, all needing their own admin and HR and stuff, and there isn’t enough money to get the equipment and staff we need to do our jobs. Most of us are already overworked and stressed, and this just adds more chaos to our work, which we don’t need!”
“I’ve worked at places where we’ve been told there’s no money, so we’ve held department bake sales to get the funds needed to obtain very basic equipment. Meanwhile they’re spending/wasting obscene amounts of money on restructuring, while staff can’t even get basic equipment or decent annual raises. It’s insane!”
When we asked, “Have the allegations of corruption in AHS caused you any difficulties in your job or in how the public interacts with you daily?” we got these responses.
“Not really; I am just run off my feet, and most people just want to get their health problems looked after. Complaints are more about having to wait, but a lot of patients have been supportive and grateful for the attention they get from us.”
“People are using the ER for prescription refills at hospitals because they can’t get in to see a doctor, which makes for a lot of frustration and short tempers with wait times. I’ve witnessed this firsthand. I tell them to contact their MLA instead of taking it out on staff which once again impacts morale.”
“When they see me, government corruption is the last thing on their mind; their health problem is front and centre, and that is what they worry about and what I focus on.”
Solving a problem?
When Danielle Smith became premier of Alberta, she vowed to overhaul Alberta Health Services (AHS), calling it dysfunctional and pledging to complete the restructuring within 90 days. More than two years later, that overhaul is still in progress.
Smith’s plan aimed to reduce patient wait times, yet the opposite has happened. In 2024, the median wait time from a general practitioner referral to specialist treatment in Alberta hit 38.4 weeks—up from 33.5 weeks in 2023—placing the province among those with the longest wait times in Canada.
So, if restructuring isn’t fixing wait times, what is it achieving?
Dr. Braden Manns, former interim vice-president of AHS and now a professor of medicine and health economics at the University of Calgary, suggests the changes are more about government control than patient care.
“It’s very clear that one of the motivations of this is to pull the health-care system up closer to governments, to ministries — pull the information function up closer, pull the decision-making capacities up closer, control the flow of information [and] make it less transparent.”
Like any corporate restructuring, disruption is inevitable. Right now, AHS staff and Albertans are bearing the brunt of that upheaval. But will this short-term pain lead to long-term gain—or will the confusion and chaos persist?
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, frontline staff continue to work hard to keep Albertans healthy.
