As I lay bleeding

(The following guest blog was originally published April 20, 2010 by the Alberta Teacher’s Association.)

An educator’s reflections on our healthcare system

Dennis Theobald

Recently, I had an opportunity to become more closely acquainted with Alberta’s healthcare system than I would have liked. But spending a week on my back in a hospital bed with various tubes ­running in and out of me provided a wonderful, if unwelcomed, opportunity to observe through the eyes of a teacher the work of the men and women employed by Alberta’s largest public service organization, Alberta Health Services.

Alberta Health Services is a behemoth. Employing over 85,000 people in some 400 facilities around the province, its annual budget is in excess of $10 billion. When I showed up in the emergency department of my local hospital, I was just one of 1.9 million patients who present themselves seeking emergency treatment in the course of a year. Though our education system is big, the healthcare system is bigger—much bigger, but the two systems have this much in common: both are fundamentally complex and both deal with people, who have a complexity all their own. Read on…