The Society for Fair and Transparent Health Funding to Central Alberta is watching two dominos to fall as the non-profit group prepares to launch its advocacy efforts.

First would be to see if any capital dollars will be announced for the AHS Central Zone once the province’s budget is released on March 22.

An AHS needs assessment for the Red Deer hospital is expected to be made public shortly after.

“If we don’t get anything in the provincial budget, then we look forward to the needs assessment study, which is an update of 2015 and likely is going to say we need a whole lot more than we needed three years ago,” said Dr. Paul Hardy, one of the society’s founding members.

“They’ve been asking for our input and we’ve been giving it and we fully expect the needs of Red Deer Regional Hospital are going to be much more than they were three years ago in terms of beds and operating rooms.”

The society held its first meeting at the Baymont Inn and Suites in Red Deer on Tuesday night. It is searching for 10 to 12 non-physicians to serve on the group’s board. The doctors are looking for people that can bring expertise in four areas: fundraising, public engagement, government affairs and research.

Close to 50 people showed up at the start of the meeting, including Tara Deleeuw, a nurse at the Halvar Jonson Centre for Brain Injury in Ponoka, who had just finished her shift.

Deleeuw, from the Bashaw area, said she started filing FOIP requests regarding the Red Deer hospital after two of her grandchildren did not survive childbirth.

“It was evident that Red Deer wasn’t in the modern world. Our dependence was on Calgary for those types of services and equipment,” Deleeuw said.

The AHS needs assessment from 2015 found that maternal child services was among a list of programs that were operating at or beyond capacity in the Central Zone.

According to another founding member of the society, the Central Zone has not been getting its fair share of capital funding.

Dr. Keith Wolstenholme said Edmonton has recently received $1.6 billion; Calgary, $3.25 billion; the North Zone getting $1.07 billion; the South Zone getting $348 million.

By comparison, Wolstenholme said Central Zone received $46 million for a cancer centre in 2013, and $10 million for obstetrics in 2016.

“(This is) a time of outrage. This is not fair investment. This is not transparent investment,” he said. “We should be loading up buses and showing up at the Legislature.”

Hardy said he believes central Alberta gets overlooked because of its proximity to Edmonton and Calgary.

As well, he said that for two decades, there hasn’t been any political impetus to spend money in the region.

Part of the solution is to put Red Deer on the map for people who live in larger centres, he said.

“I think there’s a significant lack of understanding of the population and what we actually deal with in central Alberta,” Hardy said.

“At the Red Deer Regional Hospital, we’re capable of providing very good care to seriously ill people and we do it on a daily basis. But we don’t have the infrastructure to serve the numbers of people that we should be, close to home.”