Dual practice healthcare model will reduce surgery wait times, says Hunter

Posted on September 17, 2026 by admin

By Trevor Busch
Westwind Weekly News
editor@tabertimes.com

Alberta’s new dual practice healthcare model is designed to allow physicians the ability to better utilize their time and reduce congestion in the province’s health care system, argues Taber-Warner MLA Grant Hunter. 

The dual practice model, enabled by Bill 11 and set to be rolled out across Alberta in September, allows eligible surgeons to perform elective procedures in both the public and private health systems, provided they fulfill a mandatory minimum of publicly-funded operating hours.

“There’s a couple of things, first of all, that I think are valuable in moving this way,” said Hunter. “First of all, the vast majority of other jurisdictions that practice socialized medicine also have this type of a program that they use, and the value that we saw in other jurisdictions is that sometimes what happens is a surgeon will go in to do a surgery and they’re told by the hospital, ‘Sorry, we can’t have you do it today. We don’t have the staff.’ That happens more than you would like to know or like to hear, and so that surgery is canceled or rescheduled. So here’s the problem: a surgeon who’s been going to school for 12 years wants to be fully active in his practice, his or her practice, and so what happens is we lose surgeons to other jurisdictions where they can actually be in control and make sure that they actually are always going to be practicing. So, if a surgeon is not 100 per cent active – they’re high performing people – they’re not going to be happy about that.”

Under the new model, medically necessary treatment in the public system remains strictly free at the point of service under the Canada Health Act, and eligible procedures will focus on elective, non-emergency care such as hip and knee replacements, cataracts, and select orthopedic or plastic surgeries. Critical or life saving care, such as cancer operations, will remain entirely public.

“Dual practice in other jurisdictions, what happens is the surgeon can be far more active and far more engaged in the practice that they’ve been trained to do, and so that’s one good thing,” said Hunter. “And so we believe that just as in other jurisdictions, that will actually help surgeons stay here because they will be able to practice more of their trade, so that’s one thing. The other thing is that it’s going to be valuable. Look, we send people already to other jurisdictions. They go to the east, they go down to the States. They go to other jurisdictions that actually will do private surgeries, and when they go to those other jurisdictions, they take hard-earned money that they have here and put that money in other jurisdictions. The nice thing about having dual practice is that we have the ability now to actually have that money stay here in Alberta.”

Participating physicians under the new model must maintain a set commitment to the public system, keep separate administrative records, and submit to provincial audits.

Hunter provided an example of how a dual practice healthcare model could have helped a couple who made the difficult decision to pay for a surgery out-of-pocket.

“I’ll give you an example. Someone in my riding, they could not wait the two years it was going to take to get a hip replacement. So they went down to Kalispell. They spent the $30,000, and these were not rich people. They had to refinance their house, which is the choice they made. They refinanced their house and went down, and the lady got the hip replacement. To this day she says that was the best buying decision they made. Her lifestyle is great. She’s able to help around the farm, and they are quite happy with with that.”

“Here in Alberta, if we had dual practice – which is what we’re setting up – rather than her going down to Kalispell, she could do that hip replacement here, and what’s neat about it is there’s two types of hip replacements,” continued Hunter. “If I understand it correctly, there’s one that’s costing us about $11,000, and another one that’s, I think, $19,000. If this was the $11,000 Canadian hip replacement that she got down in the states for $30,000, we’d have been saving her two-thirds of her money, and so we think that this is going to be a great help to Alberta because waiting on long wait lines for surgeries is not good health care.”

Proponents of the model argue letting doctors utilize private facilities for extra capacity cuts down on extensive backlog lists, but critics and health advocates warn it could draw medical staff away from public hospitals, risks resource rationing based on personal wealth, and strains overall healthcare equity, while suggesting it represents a potential violation of the federal Canada Health Act. 

“We are in contact with the federal health minister on a regular basis, and we’ve not been told that this is actually breaking the Canada Health Act. So, if that’s a criticism that’s being levelled, I don’t see any any evidence to show that that’s the case,” said Hunter. “Once again, this is an issue a doctor or a surgeon will have to prove that they are doing surgeries during the day, during the hours that they would normally do those surgeries, and this would be something that could be done after hours and on the weekends. So this is not going to take away anything from the work that they’re already doing. This is just going to supplement the time that they have on evenings or on the weekends.”