Just when you think summer in Alberta has left nothing to write about except the weather, along comes a tidbit tart enough to make you pucker up and say “What the hell!”
This week it’s the idea that Alberta doctors could be paid as much as $518 an hour if they’re called on to deal with an outbreak of swine flu (more officially known as H1N1) of pandemic proportions.
The fee is being discussed as part of negotiations between the province and the Alberta Medical Association. Doctors who step up to help the province battle the virus will receive a guaranteed minimum salary based on their provincial billings the previous year. The negations also offer docs the choice of a fee-for-service where every visit is worth a bill, or an hourly rate. That rate fluctuates based on time of day: $260 an hour during weekday shifts, $403 evenings and weekends and $518 nights.
Dr. Noel Grisdale, president of the AMA, has told provincial media the rates are intended to protect incomes if doctors abandon their private practices to be part of a provincial crisis response team.
Alberta’s nurses are understandably upset.
Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses, told the media the high-priced plan is “utter nonsense.”
None of her members – 158,000 across Canada – will be offered pandemic bonuses. James Finstad, a mouthpiece for Alberta’s superboard Alberta Health Services, told the Edmonton Journal this province’s nurses will be expected to live up to the terms of their existing contracts, H1N1 mushroom cloud or no.
“Yes, nurses are under contract; well, so are doctors,” Silas told The Journal. “None of them work for free. When we are talking about a public crisis that may happen, we think it’s ridiculous.”
That it is.
Granted, this isn’t Hollywood and we can’t expect George Clooney or Ed Bagley Jr. or Noah Wylie to show up and spend every second it takes to make Albertans well again with no thought to their own safety or future. But we can expect things to be equal.
Anyone responding to a health crisis serious enough to end in “-demic”, whether pan- or epi-, is entitled to earn some kind of danger pay top-up. That includes doctors, nurses and other emergency personnel. If anything, doctors should maybe get a little less because they will have more limited contact that other frontliners.
All those knowingly exposing themselves in an effort to help Alberta at large should further be eligible for beefed-up sick pay or critical illness coverage. If you get sick because I coughed on you while getting a flu shot, you shouldn’t be out of pocket.
But the rub here is that danger pay and critical illness coverage has to be for everyone involved.
If it’s just for an already well-compensated elite – well even a spoon full of sugar can’t help that particular pill go down.
-TMac