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Hospital aims to stay in black this year

Health Sciences North is aiming to present a balanced budget at its annual general meeting June 27, said the hospital's senior vice-president on Tuesday.
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After Health Sciences North tackled its budget deficit last year by cutting funds to its surgical program. Dr. Peter Zalan, president of the hospital's medical staff, said he's concerned about the impact of further cuts as the facility looks to balance its books. File photo.

Health Sciences North is aiming to present a balanced budget at its annual general meeting June 27, said the hospital's senior vice-president on Tuesday.

“Our goal is to balance,” said Joe Pilon, speaking to Northern Life after a hospital board of directors meeting. “We're pretty close. We still have a little ways to go, but we're almost there.”

At its last annual general meeting, the hospital posted a $3.4-million deficit for 2011-2012, one of the factors behind the North East LHIN's decision to arrange for a peer review of the hospital's services.

The North East LHIN also required Health Sciences North to submit a balanced 2012-2013 budget projection last fall.

Pilon said the hospital has asked all of its departments to find out what they have to do to meet financial targets. At this point, the hospital isn't looking at layoffs, he said.

But the president of Health Sciences North's medical staff said he expects these budget-balancing measures to come at the cost of more cuts to the surgical program.

“Health Sciences North decreased the budget of the surgical program last year in order to eliminate its deficit,” said Dr. Peter Zalan.

“This meant less time available for surgeons to operate. As a consequence, the wait times for non-emergent back surgery, hernia repair and the removal of gallbladders, to give some examples, are now well over six months.

“Surgeons have commented that they are embarrassed to meet new patients in the office since they cannot offer them timely help.

“This year's budget is yet to be released, but we anticipate more cuts. This is said with no intent to lay blame. Health Sciences North must do what it needs to do to live within its budget allocation.”

Part of the problem, he said, is the fact that all hospitals in the province received a zero-per-cent increase in base operating funding for 2012-13. They'll receive the same zero-per-cent increase in 2012-14.

In contrast, the home and community care sector will receive an average increase of more than five per cent over the next three years.

While Pilon said the hospital fully supports the government's efforts to move more resources into the home and community sector, he said it's difficult to operate with zero-per-cent increases because certain costs are going up.

“When wage increases are occurring and your funding doesn't go up, you have to find improvements in your productivity, so you need to find more efficiencies,” Pilon said.

“Our goal is to find as much or more service with the same dollars that we have. That's part of our transformation to a lean hospital that looks at our processes, eliminates waste and finds improvements.

“That's the right thing to do, and that's what we've asked our physicians and our staff to do. We're working on that.”

He said wait times for some of the surgeries mentioned by Zalan are going up because the government doesn't provide special wait times funding for these procedures.

Because no special funding is in place, these surgeries are paid for through the hospital's global budget, which “is being impacted because we're not getting any increase from the government,” Pilon said.

Meanwhile, Health Sciences North has announced that James Conway, the former chief operations officer at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, will be the guest speaker at the annual general meeting.

In 1995, two tragic medication errors occurred at Dana Farber. Under Conway's leadership, there was a change to institutional practices and culture for the institute's leadership, staff and physicians.

Health Sciences North board chair Russ Boyles said he thinks it will be valuable to “hear how we can successfully embrace a cultural transformation towards patient-centredness for the benefit of our patients and staff.”


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