New Premier Danielle Smith plans to move on Alberta Health Services by the end of this year.

In her first news conference, Smith says staffing problems in health care were caused by management rules with vaccine mandates.

"I want our frontline workers to know, reinforcements are coming, we cannot continue understaffing our hospitals and then forcing our frontline workers to work mandatory overtime and be called in on days off and have to cancel their holidays, that's been the situation for the last two-and-a-half years," she says.

"A lot of that problem was created by policies at Alberta Health Services of having mandatory vaccinations so it prevented us from being able to hire back everyone who had been let go up until two-and-a-half months ago when cabinet directed them to end the mandate, prevented us from being able to graduate students across the full range of professions because they also had vaccine mandates, it also prevented us from being able to hire from other jurisdictions through the full range of people who otherwise would have wanted to come here because of vaccine mandates, so they actually at the management level made things even worse for our front line."

Smith says Dr. Deena Hinshaw is out as the top medical advisor.

The Premier also set out to clarify the Sovereignty Act which she put forward on the campaign trail.

"I think we know in our country we have a bit of a unique situation where we have exclusive powers granted to the federal level of government and exclusive powers granted to the provincial level of government, we also have a court that acts as a referee and there are multiple levels of court and sometimes decisions get overturned up to the level of the Supreme Court," Smith explained. "When the Supreme Court makes a decision we have to abide by that, people asked me through the campaign if I would ignore the carbon tax and I said 'this is an issue where the court has already rendered a decision, so we have to find other ways to address affordability for our citizens."

She did say that because circumstances have changed, with things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the province could re-litigate the measure.

The UCP caucus will hold a retreat at Sylvan Lake next week to go over priorities and a new cabinet will be sworn in on October 21st.