Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the province will be looking to scale back administrative positions with the establishment of its new Health Shared Services (HSS). HSS was announced last week in Budget 2026 as an administrative branch communicating between the province’s four health pillars. The premier said they will be taking a look at the structural alignment of HSS to make sure there isn’t redundancy through the province’s other functions. “It’s the HR function, the payroll function, the IT function, the administrative function,” said Smith at a press conference in Calgary on Monday. “We want to make sure that that is available to all four of the new service providing entities, but we can also streamline that. “The principal goal of everything we’re doing is to have fewer people in those administrative roles and more people in the frontline roles.” She said that work will begin in earnest this year. A statement from the premier’s office said there will be approximately 10,600 full-time employees working for HSS, which was established on Dec. 1, 2025. Chris Gallaway, executive director of health advocacy group Friends of Medicare, said the health administrative arm already existed under Alberta Health Services (AHS). “We’re seeing the government split it up into four pillars, multiple other agencies, and now we have this new shared service agency (with) $2.3 billion of the health-care budget going to that,” said Gallaway. “When they announced this plan and this idea, they estimated $85 million would be the cost of this restructuring. It’s obviously been far more than that, and now we’re spending billions of dollars to try to reintegrate a system that was already integrated.” The total health-care budget is $34.4 billion – up about $2 billion from 2025. Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services Matt Jones said the purpose of restructuring the system is to put a dedicated focus on the different areas of health. “So you look at prevention or primary care, acute care, mental health and addictions, and continuing care – they have a greater focus today than ever before,” said Jones. “We don’t want to lose the benefits of the supports behind a complex, integrated system. That’s really what the HSS organization is. It’s a recognition that we can be efficient by having common resources that all of these entities need in one area so we don’t have to duplicate.” The province allocated $81 million to restructure and modernize Alberta’s health-care system last year. An annual report on how much it actually cost the province to split AHS into four agencies will be disclosed in July’s annual report. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti
