As the first week of hearings in Calgary of an inquiry into preferential treatment in Alberta’s health system, two major political figures took the stand – and both had similar testimony.
Current ethics commissioner Neil Wilkinson testified in Calgary Thursday, and said he couldn’t recall cases of VIP treatment from his time as chairman of Capital Health.
“This just wasn’t part of our culture, this wasn’t part of things that we cared about,” Wilkinson said Thursday. “When you talk about a sense of fairness that we had, and one of our missions was to have respect for those who serve and those who are being served.
“In that aspect, you don’t pull strings.”
However, he also said he was not aware of Capital Health’s former CEO Sheila Weatherill calling staff to have them check on the progress of ‘VIP’ patients.
Weatherill testified earlier this week, and said she had personally called hospital executives to tell them a prominent person was coming for treatment – but insisted the calls were for information purposes only.
She said she never followed up on those calls.
Wilkinson also said in his testimony that checking up on VIP patients would have made up a small part of work by health staff.
Minister of Health Fred Horne also took the stand Thursday afternoon – where he denied any knowledge of queue-jumping cases.
Earlier Thursday, a Calgary-based orthopedic surgeon said on the stand that people are constantly trying to use connections to get quicker medical attention, and it’s something that won’t change.
Dr. Nicholas Mohtadi said sometimes, he and other doctors might make time to offer medical advice to friends or colleagues who ask for it – but he said if he personally gives medical advice, he does it on his own time and outside of office hours so as to not impact the wait times of patients.
He said more resources need to be utilized to prevent queue-jumping from happening.
With files from the Canadian Press and CTV Calgary
