Q&A: DynaLife CEO explains long waits for blood work in Calgary, what they're doing to help

The CEO of DynaLife, which took over Calgary's community and non-urgent hospital lab services in December, says there are a number of reasons why wait times for residents have ballooned over the last few months.

Jason Pincock joined the Calgary Eyeopener on Monday to explain some of the issues the company is facing.

He said this isn't what their services should look like typically.

"It's a very complex issue, but we are very committed to the Calgary region," he said. "We are equally frustrated. It's not our normal to have these kinds of waits."

The province announced private company DynaLife would take over lab services from Alberta Precision Laboratories last summer. The Alberta-based company has operated clinics in other parts of the province for decades.

But since the transition, some Calgary patients say they're now waiting five weeks or more for routine appointments, causing concern for loved ones in need of lab results.

Pincock spoke with the host of the Calgary Eyeopener, Loren McGinnis, about why Calgarians are seeing these delays and what the company is doing to shorten wait times.

LISTEN | DynaLife CEO explains why the system is experiencing difficulties:

The following has been edited for length and clarity. 

LM: We've heard from frustrated people that it can take five to six weeks to book an appointment. Why is that happening?

JP: The reality is that the challenges in Calgary were coming this spring whether DynaLife was here or not, and they're really related to three things. 

One is Calgary does not have enough physical sites. The last site that was built in Calgary to support community labs was almost 15 years ago. By comparison, Edmonton has almost a third, a quarter to a third, more sites than Calgary where we operate. And so we know that there is an infrastructure challenge that has been coming for some time to Calgary. 

Calgary also did not weather COVID well when it came to workforce, and like nursing, lab is another area where there is a shortage of qualified medical professionals. And that shortage is very acute in the Calgary region. In fact, we have staff deployed from across the province coming into Calgary every week right now, helping out in Calgary to help get through this piece.

And the third piece that's really impacting it is it's now Calgary's turn to go on to "Connect Care," which is AHS's new clinical information system for the whole province. As a result, we've had to pull up to 15 per cent of our staff off the front line every day, when we were short staffed to begin with, to complete that training and go live for that system on May 6. A number of the challenges and changes that people are facing is really about the transition to that new information system.

LM: Why did lab staff in Calgary not fare well, particularly here, through COVID?

JP: Across the province actually, one of the decisions AHS made in asking for our help was to focus the staff that were in the hospitals on acute care. And so one of the changes that's also impacting Calgary is that patients no longer … can use the hospitals like a community lab site. And so those patients are now all accessing the same infrastructure that was in place before that change. 

And so with COVID, a number of the training programs in Calgary actually were shut down during COVID because people couldn't do the practicum training, they couldn't do the onsite training at SAIT and other institutions. So now we're trying to ramp those programs back up. In Edmonton, we were able to work with and aid and accommodate it slightly differently.

LM: I want to ask a few practical questions so people can get an advantage on the process as it is now. Patients, we understand, with standing orders now need to bring in their own paperwork to appointments. Why has that change happened?

JP: That's actually in relation to the shift to Connect Care. So the former system used across Calgary allowed that information to be stored in AHS's system. In AHS's new system, it has to be set up again, and it's not stored in the same way.

So out of an abundance of caution, we are asking all the patients to, we are printing copies for everyone, we are giving them their standing orders, and we are asking them to bring them back in with them to ensure that there is no disruption in their care as we go through this transformation with AHS to their new provincial system.

LM: You can reserve a time for walk in and potentially get in on the same day or the next day. What is then the advantage of making an appointment weeks in advance?

JP: You can actually access labs in a number of ways. The first and most basic way is you can just walk in with no notice, no appointment. Now, of course, our staff are working all the time, they're busy sites, but … just walking in is an option. 

One of the new options that we brought to Calgary was something we created during COVID called "save my place." What that allows you to do is just get in the virtual queue that day on your phone or from your computer. And essentially what it does is it's getting you in line even though you're physically not in the site. And then it'll send you text updates to your phone … you can go get groceries, you can stay at work. You don't have to go sit in the site before your time, as long as you're there in time as indicated on your phone.

For those people who don't have access to the Internet, you can always call the call centre. That's still there. You can phone in, make an appointment. If you have mobility issues, we will come to you. You just have to go through your physician, and we will come to your home or your extended care facility. So there are a whole number of ways you can access labs in addition to making a future appointment.

LM: You mentioned something like six weeks as the time horizon on this acute challenge you're facing, based on the circumstances you outlined. What's going to happen in the next six weeks to fix this?

JP: So over the next six weeks, we are going live with this new information system. So we're going to get our staff back on the front line. That'll really help. 

Number 2 is one of the challenges that Calgary's had is you've had very limited evening hours, very limited weekend hours. So we're actually going to open up additional sites to evenings and weekends, not just temporarily, but permanently. That'll add a lot more appointments to the system. 

We're actually going to open up two new sites in June, so this will move Calgary from 18 to 20 sites. Edmonton, I think, is at about 26 right now by comparison. So there's still more to build, but two additional sites will add more capacity.

LM: Recognizing what you're saying about this sort of confluence of challenges, and the timing of DynaLife taking over the service, was DynaLife ready to confront what we're facing now?

JP: There was no easy way to go through this. So the honest answer is I would have loved to have had an extra year before some of these challenges, but unfortunately … we've only had a few months to get ready for this. That being said, we know how to do this. 

To give Calgary some sense of what normal should look like — normal should look like, two weeks out, you can book an appointment for a fixed time. Walk-ins, where you just walk in and don't use "save my place," that should be in the half an hour to 45 minute kind of range.

I would just ask all your listeners, our staff are under a ton of stress. It's a big change. Lots of big changes for them. They're all the same staff. We kept all the same staff from AHS. We moved everybody over. Everyone kept their jobs. But the reality is there were gaps and challenges that we stepped into, and one of the reasons we did that is because we know we can help.