Alberta’s auditor general recommends new system for health reporting, finds disparity

EDMONTON — Alberta’s auditor general says the province needs a new framework for measuring and reporting the performance of its health-care system.

Doug Wylie, in a new report Thursday, says the recommendation comes after his office found numerous inconsistencies with health-care reporting in recent years, including Premier Danielle Smith’s 2022 health-care action plan.

Public reporting was a major commitment in Smith’s pledge to fix the health system, but Wylie’s report says the reports that stemmed from that pledge were inconsistent and didn’t always follow up on promised metrics.

Smith had announced the endeavour shortly after taking office, and it came just as she fired the board of the provincial health authority, Alberta Health Services, and replaced it with a lone administrator.

Wylie’s report says almost half of the reporting measures that were promised, including utilization of operating rooms or how long it takes for paramedics to off-load patients at emergency departments, were never fulfilled.

The latter metric, according to Wylie’s report, was committed to before it was confirmed that the data even existed or that methods were available to track it.

Public reporting on the plan’s achievements also lacked definitions of measures, explanations on how numbers were calculated or where the data was coming from.

Another issue identified by Wylie related to Smith’s plan was instances of data being cherry-picked to make the system appear more efficient.

An example included in Thursday’s report was related to ambulance response times. In April of 2023, response times were shown to have improved. In rural areas, wait times had shortened to just under 40 minutes from an average of 60 minutes.

“We traced the … numbers to a single week in mid-April, when the wait times for remote (emergency services) temporarily dipped to 39.6 minutes from a consistent weekly average of around 63 minutes,” the report says.

Wylie said in an interview Thursday that he doesn’t think politics are to blame, rather he attributed the shortcomings to a failure to use best practices. “We just found that lacking in this health-care action plan,” he said.

Not all of the reporting issues Wylie’s office identified were related to the premier’s plan, as his audit covered entire the 2022-23 fiscal year for Alberta Health Services.

Wylie’s report found AHS failed to meet provincially required reporting laws by not publishing a business plan in 2023, and the following year’s business plan was only published when the year was coming to close.

Wylie said inconsistent reporting at AHS should also be attributed to widespread turnover at the agency’s board and executive level. AHS reporting guidelines were determined to be either outdated or nonexistent. That’s why, Wylie said, he’s recommending government create a new authoritative framework to guide public reporting.

He added it should be considered a major priority considering the government’s ongoing overhaul of the provincial health system.

Primary Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange’s office said Thursday that it was disappointed AHS fell short on reporting.

“This is one of the reasons why we refocused the health-care system and made AHS into a service provider under Acute Care Alberta,” it said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Acute Care Alberta said it had accepted the recommendations and will be developing new policies and procedures to address the issues Wylie identified.

“This will include clear articulation of roles and accountabilities, better documentation, stronger verification and validation of processes, and required sign off of leadership on all publicly released performance reports.”

It also said the ministry plans to develop a new reporting framework, which it expects will improve “consistency, transparency and legal compliance.”

Wylie’s report comes one day after the premier announced the next steps in her government’s health-care reform: an action plan for freeing up hospital beds by moving patients who don’t need hospital-level care into settings designed for longer-term stays.

Data issues were something she told reporters was a major hurdle the government had recently tackled.

“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 11, 2025.

Jack Farrell, The Canadian Press