Laboratory work and the health-care professionals that provide it are vital to Alberta’s health-care system.
In 2023, the Alberta government selected a for-profit company — DynaLife, to provide lab services across the entire province. It didn’t go well.
It extended wait times for patients, created chaos for workers, and cost millions of dollars. Alberta’s health-care professionals raised the alarm, and the public system had to take over again to provide stable services for Albertans. How did we get here and what were the impacts of this failed experiment?
Watch our video to hear directly from the frontline health-care professionals.
For-profit health care promises to be cheaper and more efficient than public health care. But what we see over and over again is the opposite. In this case, privatizing these health-care services was supposed to ‘save $100 million a year’ but instead cost Albertans at least $65 million just to cancel the project after months of failing to deliver.
For-profit labs under DynaLife led to patients waiting weeks and months for appointments, and walk ins waiting for hours upon hours, while workers were given uncertainty about wage fairness and retirement security. HSAA laboratory professionals, united in solidarity for fairness and their patients – and won!
For-profit health care hurts patients and health-care workers in Alberta. We need a stable, public lab system to retain talented lab professionals to ensure Albertans get the high-quality care they need and deserve.
For-profit care prioritizes shareholder profits over patient care — by undermining workers’ wages and benefits. This makes it even harder to retain and recruit workers in a system already struggling with a short-staffing crisis.
