The province’s recent announcement of plans to build two urgent-care centres in Edmonton, among others across Alberta, is rekindling calls for a new hospital on the city’s south side. On Monday, the province pledged to build nine urgent-care centres, which it says will divert patients from emergency rooms and ease pressure on hospitals. Stony Plain-Spruce Grove, Fort McMurray and Cold Lake will also get new centres. The province is allocating $39 million to acquire land and begin planning. “Alberta’s ERs see more than two million visits annually,” Adrianna LaGrange, the minister for hospital and surgical health services, said Monday. “More than one-third of those visits could be handled by an urgent care centre instead.” Meanwhile, a 320-acre plot in south Edmonton’s Heritage Valley area remains empty, despite a provincial promise to build a hospital there. In 2017, the then-governing Alberta NDP unveiled plans for a $1.8-billion facility near Ellerslie Road and 127 Street SW. Two years later, the United Conservative Party took power and delayed, then ultimately cancelled, the project, saying it would have cost $5 billion for the 500 beds it would have provided. The last time a new hospital opened in Edmonton was 1988, when the city’s population was about 580,000. Today, it has more than doubled to 1.2 million. The proposed urgent-care centres, expected to open in about six years, would be able to treat broken bones and cuts but would not handle emergencies or operate around the clock, a service Jon Morgan says his constituents are “aching” for. The city councillor whose ward includes the site of the cancelled hospital says he hopes the province reconsiders building the facility, which was originally expected to open this year “There are a lot of people who made their homes here, made lives here, because of that service they were expecting,” he told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday. Neighbouring councillor Mike Elliott says a new south-side hospital “is severely needed” but welcomed news of the urgent-care facility, calling it “advantageous and a benefit” for residents on the city’s edge who face traffic congestion, road construction and other barriers to accessing health care. “The biggest message I can take away from my constituents is that, especially in the wintertime and with the construction ongoing, is, ‘How can an ambulance get to me? How can I get out?’ Those are the main two factors: one, getting services to them, and two, being able to get out of their communities in a time of need.” With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Chelan Skulski
