Beyond Beds and Buzzwords: Why Experience Should be the Real Strategy for Alberta’s Continuing Care Future.
Each year, J5 Design attends the Alberta Continuing Care Conference, where leaders and practitioners across the province gather to discuss how all of us can improve how we age, how we live, and how we are supported. This year the urgency felt higher: Alberta is undergoing major structural shifts. One of the key changes is the establishment of Assisted Living Alberta (ALA), a new provincial agency created to bring together medical supports, social and non-medical services, home-care, community care and continuing-care homes into a more integrated system.
The government’s narrative is around beds, capacity, data, and AI. How many continuing-care and supportive living spaces will we need? How fast can technology help us enable care from the new facilities or from home? How can we reduce wait lists, align home-care and facility-care, and use analytics to forecast demand? These are vital questions.
But as I listened and observed on the floor, I kept thinking: what about the people inside the system? Are the residents, families and staff experiencing care in a way that fosters dignity, connection, purpose and wellbeing? Have front line workers, families and patients been invited into the creation of these new strategies or future systems? Or have many of the most important decisions been made by consultants, politicians and senior leaders that work at great distances from the realities of the front-line.
Our Work with Calgary Foothills PCN: Experience in Action
Earlier this year, we were privileged to partner with the Calgary Foothills Primary Care Network in Calgary and the Mosaic Primary Care Network to help them redesign over 10 clinics and administrative teams into a unified space. Working alongside our interior design partner, Holland Design, our collective aim was not only to improve operational efficiency, but to fundamentally re-think how staff and patients experience care.
Here is a video of the human-centred approach that was taken to deliver this project:
In that project we applied J5’s Total Experience Framework by bringing together:
the customer experience of patients and families (how they arrive, how they feel, how information flows)
the employee experience of clinicians, administrative staff and care teams (how the workspace supports their roles, how handoffs happen)
the strategy of the network (what vision it has, how it aligns with community health)
the operations of the building, wayfinding, technology and support infrastructure (how space and systems enable the above).
One design decision: the reception is placed in a sun-filled corner, seating includes a quiet kids’ zone, wayfinding is clear and intuitive, staff and patient entrances are separated to reduce disruption. Together, we observed that when you design for experience first, the “efficiency” and “throughput” metrics follow and you create a space where care feels human and connected.
This kind of thinking translates directly into continuing-care and assisted-living contexts. If we apply the same human-centred blueprint to elder-care settings, then capacity expansions, new homes, AI systems and bed counts become tools supporting better experience, not the other way around.
The Capacity Problem: Why Funding Experience Can Be Hard to Sell
Here’s a challenge we heard repeatedly: in Alberta many continuing-care facilities are full. Waiting lists are long. Beds are at capacity. At first glance, this suggests “the market is saturated” and so investing in “experience improvements” might seem less urgent or less fundable. The logic goes: if a hotel never invested in improving guest experience it would end up empty, but hospitals and care homes never “close” because demand is constant.
That logic leads to the wrong mindset for funding bodies and agencies. When vacancy is low, the pressure is on building more beds, adding infrastructure, buying new technology - these are all highly visible and necessary outcomes and inputs. But what about day-to-day experience? What about staff burnout, families who struggle with confusing hand-offs, residents who feel disconnected from community or purpose? These human metrics often stay invisible because capacity is assumed - but they are what truly matters.
From a business case perspective: yes, you can build more beds, but what if those beds are in a facility that doesn’t respond to how people want to live? What if staffing costs skyrocket because culture and design were last priorities? What if technology is under-used because workflows didn’t consider staff realities? Paralleling the hotel analogy: you might fill every room, but if the experience is poor you get bad reviews, high turnover, reputational threat and people vote with their feet. In care, people cannot simply leave, but poor experience still manifests as turnover, complaints, sub-optimal outcomes, higher cost of care.
In other words: building capacity without experience multiplies risk. At J5, I am constantly arguing that funding must shift earlier to experience-led design, not just infrastructure and big tech. This is an ongoing challenge, but one that I feel particularly passionate because it drives my purpose of creating a kinder, more beautiful future. I believe that J5 Design brings something and unique to the marketplace that is slowly becoming recognized as the lynchpin for successful transformation - human-centred design.
Smaller Operators, Bigger Lessons
Another insight from the conference: many smaller continuing-care or supportive living operators had something powerful: stronger culture, greater closeness to the front line, tighter relationships among staff, residents and families. Yet they often lacked scalable systems, data maturity, or resource for big infrastructure investments. In contrast, the larger organizations had scale, systems and budgets, but sometimes the human connection was weaker.
We believe there is mutual learning here:
Smaller operators can teach large ones how to stay human-centric, how to retain connection, how to make the resident experience feel like home rather than institution.
Larger operators can help smaller ones adopt scalable infrastructure, consistent measurement, technology platforms, governance and data-driven decision-making.
Conferences like the ACCA’s matter because they bring those players together - both the big and the small, the innovators and the experienced and create networks of learning. The provincial government should invest more in that ecosystem because it fosters collaboration, shared practice and innovation at scale - specifically the Alberta Continuing Care Association and provincial wide initiatives like Health Aging Alberta that are critical to bringing the sector together at scale.
A Kinder, Smarter Way Forward
As Alberta builds the next generation of healthcare, home and community care, and continuing-care systems, we have a choice: do we start with systems, beds, and technology? Or do we start with people, experiences and purpose? At J5 we believe: start with experience. When experiences for patients, families and staff improve, then the strategy, operations, infrastructure and tech align behind them.
If we shift our funding logic accordingly, then “beds needed” becomes part of a bigger conversation: what kind of life do we want those beds to support? What kind of experiences, relationships, independence and value do we want people to have? That’s how we move from taking capacity for granted to creating care environments that matter.
