Alberta's provincial Travelling Clinic, 1924-42

Providing health services to sparsely populated, geographically isolated areas was a major challenge in many Canadian provinces before the advent of universal hospital insurance in the late 1950s, and universal physician insurance in the late 1960s. The task was especially daunting during the interwar depression years. Nonetheless, from 1924 to 1942, Alberta's Department of Public Health sponsored an itinerant Travelling Clinic during the summer which conducted physical examinations, dental examinations and treatment, tonsillectomies and other minor surgery, and vaccination against smallpox to children in frontier areas of the province. This article analyses Alberta's Travelling Clinic from a public policy perspective and concludes that through the Travelling Clinic, the Alberta government provided a health service valued by many settlers at nominal cost to itself.