Doctors in a central Alberta community are voicing their frustrations with Alberta Health Services changes they say have made the town unappealing for a general surgeon to work in — and as a result, local patients may suffer.
The Physician Group of Rocky Mountain House released a letter Tuesday to area residents explaining the situation — a last-ditch effort to get the province to have a meaningful conversation about preserving health care in the rural community.
The letter said the western Alberta community’s hospital, Rocky Mountain House Health Centre, has had a general surgical program for decades but the services are in serious jeopardy.
“Over the last 10 years, we have had multiple surgeons who have wanted to serve our community with their skills, but who have faced roadblocks preventing them from working to their full capacity,” the letter signed by 16 doctors said.
“AHS Central Zone Medical Affairs has consistently created obstacles.
“Without fail, our previous surgeons have all moved on to other areas in Alberta or other provinces, where they have been allowed to work instead of being hindered at every step.”
The letter claimed AHS has made it difficult for local surgeons to utilize the O.R. at the Rocky Mountain House hospital, and now that a community-funded expansion has opened, the health authority is prioritizing orthopedic surgeries there.
“Our beautiful new operating room, a multi-million-dollar project that was so generously donated towards by you, our community, is potentially going to be taken over by orthopedic surgeries,” the letter said, adding while they are much-needed procedures, instead of orthopedics co-existing with the established general surgery program, AHS is limiting the local general surgeon’s access to the operating room.
Dale Shippelt is a Rocky Mountain House councillor and is also on the board of the Rocky Health Foundation, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund upgrades at the hospital, including the new operating room.
“Now a sudden it seems like there’s outside influences that are taking a hold of that operating room and saying, ‘This would be better for our purposes.’ Unfortunately, small town Rocky Mountain House, you know, gets kicked to the wayside,” Shippelt said.
“We essentially have two operating rooms and they’re doing knee replacements in one and that’s caused some stresses on the operating room and what it’s done for looking after our own patients,” Shippelt said, explaining while the orthopedic patients were supposed to be day surgeries, in some cases patients are staying for two or three days to recover — taking up one of the 21 acute care beds in the hospital.
“The knee replacements, although we know they’re vital to the province and people waiting for them, at the same time, we need to make sure we look after what our community needs.”
The current doctor’s hospital privileges are being cut down to part time, resulting in them not being able to practice the full scope of their expertise. As a result, Dr. Topstad, the current general surgeon, handed in her resignation to AHS.
“Any rural general surgeon who considers applying for the position in Rocky is going to have substantially less than usual access to the operating room, making this an unappealing job prospect,” the doctor’s letter said.
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The clinical director of the Rocky Medical Clinic, where most of the doctors who signed the letter work, said Dr. Topstad is the only general surgeon at the hospital.
“Her last day is Nov. 1 so she is seeing as many cases as possible until then,” Kristen Penick told Global News.
She added they occasionally have a general surgeon from Red Deer come into Rocky Mountain House to perform endoscopy procedures but a visit of that nature hasn’t occurred since May 24.
Dr. Kim Rogers is an obstetrician who has been practicing in Rocky Mountain House since 1996 — the longest serving physician in the community — and signed the letter.
She said this isn’t a new issue, explaining locals in the town of 6,800 people have been working to preserve surgical and obstetric services for more than a decade.
“This is our third surgeon now to leave for the exact same reasons that we outlined in our letter,” she said.
“This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Rogers and Shippelt both said many fear a snowball effect, leading to a loss of more services.
“If the general surgeon is not practicing, the anaesthetist does not have sufficient skills to maintain his or her practice. Without an anaesthetist, we cannot do caesarean sections on an emergency basis,” Rogers explained.
The doctors said the AHS changes matter because without a robust local surgical program staffed with health-care workers that have maintained their expertise, procedures like C-sections will not be available.
Rogers said patients who would have been able to deliver their baby closer to home will instead have to travel further away to places like Red Deer, some 80 kilometres to the east.
“They are going to be unfairly displaced. We have Indigenous populations to the west of our community who travel a long distance just to get here for their emergency obstetrical care, for their emergency surgical care.
“It will be very difficult for them to make that extra trip to Red Deer.”
As it is, the Red Deer Regional Hospital is busy. While the ER wait time on Wednesday was only four-and-a-half hours, in recent years it has soared in excess of 14 hours.
Losing surgical and obstetric services would most likely result in further loss of family doctors and nurses, the letter said, noting they’d leave for other communities with a more stable surgical program.
“These are the same doctors and nurses who staff our hospital, ER, clinic, geriatric facilities, and outreach clinics.”
The letter also noted wait times for gastroscopies and colonoscopies, important for ruling out cancers and other conditions, are very long elsewhere in the province.
“We find this to be a heartbreaking situation for our community. We, your healthcare workers, have been fighting for our surgical program for years and years, but all our efforts have fallen on deaf ears,” the letter said.
Alberta Health Services said there are no plans to decrease surgeries in Rocky Mountain House, where it said the surgical program is staffed by both permanent and locum physicians, as well as travelling surgeons for the new orthopedic surgical service.
“We share the same desire as our local physicians and the community to see the surgical program grow and thrive for years to come,” said a statement Wednesday from AHS.
“We are interviewing candidates interested in the permanent general surgeon position and continue to recruit for an additional general practitioner with anesthesia training to support the program,” AHS added.
The doctors say that doesn’t address the issue.
“Our goal is not to create an us and them circumstance — there is a valid need for orthopaedic surgery to get their waitlists down,” Rogers said. “That’s why we welcomed them into our community and supported that service here. But everything has to be able to share.”
Rogers stressed doctors in the community are not looking to pick a fight with AHS or the province but after years of going through the right channels to voice concerns and feeling they fell on deaf ears, the group felt they had to make their patients and the wider community aware.
“The community needed to know what’s happening to their to their hospital and ultimately to their physicians. We are at the lowest number of physicians that since I arrived in Rocky Mountain House.”
“We have our doctors going elsewhere because they’re being driven out.”
The Rocky Mountain House Health Centre has already been dealing with a physician shortage that has affected the emergency room.
Since the beginning of 2024, AHS has issued news releases announcing the temporary closure of the ER more than a dozen times.
The ER has experienced closures, in almost all of the cases during the overnight hours, for 14 days in total.
Each time the health authority has said it’s been because of an “unanticipated gap in physician coverage.”
Joyce Donald is a recently retired RN who worked for 32 years in Rocky Mountain House, either at the hospital or within the area’s primary care networks. She knows the community and its health struggles well.
Donald said not having a surgeon increases the risk of more ER closures, as the two departments often work hand-in-hand.
“If we lose our physicians, we kind of lose our emerg because that is a 24-7 that needs to be covered. We’ve all already gotten into positions where our emergency has to close because we don’t have enough physicians to cover that,” Donald said.
“We just don’t want it to get worse.”
Rogers agrees.
“What we fear is the loss of obstetrical services in our community and the loss of physicians in our community. We can’t afford to lose any more. There are gaps in emergency room coverage. We have thousands of patients that do not have primary care physicians,” Rogers said.
“We can’t afford to lose any more doctors.”