Alberta's medical lab mayhem during privatization shows importance of oversight on errors, doctors say

Doctors and researchers say a series of U-turns on privatizing laboratory services in Alberta has short-changed patients facing delays in diagnosis and treatment, creating chaos that offers lessons for other parts of the country.  

In Alberta, responsibility for lab testing at facilities outside hospitals switched between public and private hands several times over nearly three decades.  

Last year, the United Conservative Party (UCP) government privatized the province's community lab services in a deal with Dynalife Medical Labs. 

 Within months of the long-planned takeover, lab testing backlogs for patients grew onerous. In August, the province announced all of its labs would be brought back under the government-owned Alberta Precision Labs (APL) by the end of 2023.

Rebecca Graff-McRaw, a research manager with the Parkland Institute, a public policy research institute, evaluated the fallout.

"The driving force behind so much of these changes has come down to political ideology," Graff-McRaw said. 

"Is it lower cost at any cost or is it about how do we preserve the quality and stability of that service while trying to maintain its sustainability?"

Graff-McRaw used freedom of information requests, questionnaires of public and private sector lab professionals, and financial data from Alberta Health Services and Dynalife, a private, for-profit lab company, for a 2022 report before the government reversed course.

Now, Alberta's auditor general is investigating what went wrong with the abandoned plan.

But in the meantime, physicians and patients say they're looking for stability, transparency and quality care.

Patients like Lita Bablitz demand accountability from labs in both sectors. Bablitz, 50, went in for a routine mammogram in 2021.

Based on biopsies read at Dynalife Labs in September 2021, Bablitz was originally diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ or DCIS, which the Canadian Cancer Society's website calls the most common type of non-invasive breast cancer.

"They didn't tell me I might have cancer," Bablitz said. "They told me I did have cancer."

She had a partial mastectomy of her right breast at Edmonton's Cross Cancer Institute a month later.