Alberta Health Services Confirms It Will Cut Hundreds of Jobs Across Province

The emergency department of the Rockyview General Hospital is pictured in Calgary on March 20, 2025. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

Alberta Health Services (AHS) says it will be laying off approximately 100 employees and cutting 300 vacant roles as part of “an internal human resources matter.”

The layoffs represent 0.4 percent of the AHS workforce and will not impact any existing front-line clinical positions or services, AHS said in an Oct. 15 email statement to The Epoch Times.

“Some of these positions include, but are not limited to, roles in IT, finance, human resources, and community engagement and communications,” spokesperson Kristen Anderson wrote. “AHS is grateful for the contributions of all impacted employees and will support them and their teams in the weeks ahead.”

AHS says it began sending out layoff notices Oct. 14 but won’t offer “any further comment” because the layoffs are “an internal human resources matter.”

Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government introduced a number of changes to the provincial health-care system in 2023, including calling for dissolving the AHS and breaking it into four agencies: Primary Care Alberta, Recovery Alberta, Assisted Care Alberta, and Acute Care Alberta. Each agency is tasked with overseeing a different part of the province’s health-care needs.

Alberta introduced Bill 55, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, in May to move ahead with the restructuring first proposed in 2023. The legislation was granted royal assent and officially became law on May 15; however, not all of its restructuring provisions have taken effect.

The changes will decentralize provincial health-care decision-making and shift important policies to front-line health-care providers, according to the province, which also said the amendments will give more efficacy to investigations of mistreatment of seniors in long-term care facilities and give patients and social services more control over their personal health data. Various matters formerly in the domain of AHS such as immunizations and disease control are also shifted to Primary Care Alberta instead of AHS as a part of the changes.

“These amendments will ensure that all components of the health-care system can fully transition to our refocused health-care system—a system that Albertans have helped to build by sharing their expertise, their feedback, their experiences, and their insights,” Alberta’s Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said in May while announcing the changes.

Primary Care Alberta, Recovery Alberta, Assisted Care Alberta, and Acute Care Alberta are now active, part of what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said is part of an effort to improve health-care in the province.

“It’s no secret I have been unhappy with the level and quality of service delivered by AHS,” Smith said in May. “I will continue to relentlessly push forward to make improvements.”

Alberta’s New Democratic Party (NDP), meanwhile, has criticized the changes to Alberta’s health-care system, calling them steps toward privatization.

“The UCP cares more about privatization ... than you,” NDP health critic Sarah Hoffman posted Oct. 8 on X. “While the UCP are siphoning public funds to private operators and charging people for vaccines, over one million Albertans still don’t have a family doctor.”