Alberta Health Services is borrowing $220 million from the Royal Bank to help ease a $1.2 billion budget crunch — a move approved at a meeting of the amalgamated provincial health board Thursday.

Stephen Duckett, president and CEO of Alberta Health Services. (CBC)"We're able to cover our deficit at the moment," said Stephen Duckett, chief executive officer of AHS. "But obviously, if we continue on our current trends, we'll have to borrow some more, which is what we said at the start of the year."

Duckett said the projected deficit does not include the cost of the swine flu vaccination program, estimated at between $100 million and $150 million.

The agency has announced plans to cut costs by leaving 660 vacant positions unfilled and encouraging eligible staff to take early retirement.

More trimming is in the works, Duckett said.

"We're looking at consolidation of pharmacy distribution," he said. "There's a whole lot of other strategies that we're still examining, because as you will appreciate, finding savings of this kind while still protecting access and quality, it requires rigor and requires us to work through this in a systematic and serious way."

The amalgamation of regional health boards into one provincewide "superboard" has made a mess of Alberta's health care system, said Liberal MLA Kevin Taft.

"They're now off on the market borrowing from the Royal Bank and taking all kinds of activities that suggest they're more and more thinking of themselves as a single big corporation, and I think the logic of this playing out through time is pretty unnerving," Taft said.