Dr. John Cowell is the new official administrator of AHS, a role he held once before in 2014
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Dr. John Cowell took a bad fall on Feb. 16 and broke a bone in his knee joint. He quickly got a close-up look at the EMS and acute-care systems he now has enormous power to change and, hopefully, improve.
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Cowell is the new official administrator of AHS, a role he also held once before in 2014.
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“I was lying there in the mud and a Good Samaritan called EMS,” he says. “The ambulance didn’t arrive all that quickly.”
Then he went through all the ordeals familiar to thousands of Albertans — waiting to be transferred from the ambulance to the hospital, waiting again to be seen, waiting for a bed, waiting to be treated, waiting, waiting.
“It focuses the mind,” he said. “I got additional perspective on what needs to be done.”
Cowell hardly needed the lesson. The former head of the Health Quality Council — the agency that examines health-care systems and problems — he’s been involved in major inquiries on intimidation of doctors and alleged privileged access to health care.
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I’ve had a lot of admiration for Cowell over the years. He has told politicians what they need to hear and delved fearlessly into dark corners and special interests of health care. From what I know of him, he would refuse any political order he believed would harm health care or patients.
Asked if he will now be just a pipeline for orders from Health Minister Jason Copping or Premier Danielle Smith, Cowell said: “That is not the case at all. What the official administrator is mandated to do is stay focused on the priority items that have been determined by the government to improve and change in this time of crisis and urgency.”
He also has some say in finances and personnel decisions. But the immediate focus is on EMS, emergency-room logjams and surgical wait times.
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Cowell will also look quickly at big changes in the management layer of AHS — one of Smith’s campaign pledges.
“Job 1 for me is to evaluate the executive leadership,” says Cowell. “Are the jobs they are doing appropriate?
“And, yes, I am absolutely the one who has the power and the authority to make those changes. That is part of my mandate.”
At the same time, Cowell had high praise for Mauro Chies, the interim CEO of AHS, and feels they can work together, even as Cowell guides the search for a permanent CEO.
Cowell had barely retired from the Health Quality Council in 2013 when he was called on to administer the entire system after then-health minister Fred Horne fired the board over an executive pay dispute.
There were other, deeper problems, but nothing like the crises in EMS, emergency care and surgery waits that he faces on his second run at this job.
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“I know what could be done and should be done,” he says. “The big trick is getting it done. It’s a matter of properly aligning human resources — which, of course, is an issue too — with the available facilities.
“We know what tools we need. What I’ll be looking at are the issues that are preventing these known solutions from being properly implemented.
“There are known blocks, and there are known ways we can detour around them. I’m increasingly optimistic.”
Why is an administrator even needed? Cowell feels this is a moment when a board, which debates every issue, has to be temporarily replaced by a single person with authority to act immediately.
“What this does is stop the discussion and endless re-evaluation. It gets the system off its heels onto its toes and moving again. We have to see through the lens of what our citizens need and we have to get moving on it.”
“I’m not going to do things so quickly that I make the wrong call . . . but we need to get things moving because we cannot stay in the status quo.
“I will be making decisions. Stay tuned.”
Albertans certainly will. They’ll be eager to know if fine words finally bring results.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald.
Twitter: @DonBraid
Braid: New AHS overseer says he has full power to act fast on big problems - Calgary Herald
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