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Balanced PAPHR budget ‘challenging’

May 28, 2015 | 6:49 AM

There was cautious optimism last year for the Prince Albert Parkland Health Region (PAPHR) budget—this year it’s “challenging.”

That’s according to the CEO Cecile Hunt.

On Wednesday, the Prince Albert Parkland Regional Health Authority (RHA) approved the 2015-2016 operating budget at $231.9 million.

Although the budget is balanced, going forward, the RHA outlined three challenges they will face in the next fiscal year.

  • Unconfirmed costs associated with shared services such as the transition of the laundry services to K-Bro.
  • Continued availability of relief staffing at straight time rather than overtime
  • Continued high use of sick time

One solution the health region is working on is a specific project this year that will focus on recruiting appropriate relief staff. Hunt said they want to get a better sense of how many relief staff is needed and create more clarity with them on exactly how much they want to work.

“What are their goals and aspirations? Do they want full-time work? There will be those. There will be other individuals who want to work eight hours a work or two days a week and we then should not be, you know, trying to pressure those into full-time work,” Hunt said.

Currently, the PAPHR is using contract nurses to fill those gaps in service, but it comes at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Hunt said that is only a temporary measure “to ensure we’re not burning out our own staff.  Our preference is to recruit and retain our own staff—preferably new grads from this community and this province.”

To ensure the budget was balanced, the management team looked at ways to find savings and additional revenues.  Hunt said one way they are planning to do this is by looking at which open positions need to be filled and which can remain unfilled.

“A significant initiative is around vacancy management as well recruitment and retention.  It is a difficult process to leave position vacant.  Our goal is to ensure frontline positions, frontline manager positions are filled immediately,” Hunt said. As for the more senior positions, they will see how long they remain vacant.

“It does create a need to be very deliberate to ensure there’s good communication and we may find some is very doable and other vacancy management can become problematic.”

The budgeted expenditures are up from last year by $7.33 million. According to RHA, that is largely related to employee salaries, which increased by $4.42 million with benefit costs going up by almost $2 million. 

It also outlined compensation costs for contracted physicians increased by more than $840,000—mostly for more physician hours in the emergency department.

The RHA received $10.1 million to base funding from the ministry of health, which Hunt said they were expecting.

“The vast majority of those new dollars are related to collective bargaining agreements and the province has historically funded the cost of collective agreements and we were very happy to see that that was followed through,” she said.

Changes to base funding

  •  $6.3 million for increases following the new collective agreement with the Canadian Union of Public Employees
  •  $1.5 million for the additional capacity at the new Pineview Terrace, a 60-bed long-term care facility that opened in June 2014 (previous facility had 34 beds)
  •  $1 million in annualized funding for the Home First program (previously targeted funding) – $434,000 for Computerized Tomography (CT) services (previously targeted funding)
  •  $173,000 for HIV programs (previously targeted funding)
  •  Frozen funding for endoscopy ($284,000) and rural locum physician services (1 FTE), that will be released when services are in place or targets achieved.
  •  $12,000 for to cover funding increases (one per cent) to community-based organizations (Prince Albert Parkland provides funding to SHARE, Canadian Mental Health Association – Prince Albert, Family Futures – Prince Albert, Prince Albert Co-operative Health Centre, and Prince Albert Mobile Crisis Unit to support specific programs)

Hunt said they are happy to see new resources for the Home First program and funds to address emergency department wait times.

“So that has continued the support for the seven hours of physician services and 1.2 FTE for the nursing positions,” she said.

“It isn’t perhaps everything we asked for, but it is a good beginning and we need to demonstrate that we can meet targets, so we can sustain this funding.”

The RHA also approved the 2015-2016 capital equipment and capital management budgets.

More than $3 million was budget for capital equipment including funding to support diagnostic initiatives such as a new Computerize Tomography (CT) scanner and new ultrasound machine.

The capital management budget of $3.1 million will address life safety/emergency and infrastructure projects like updating building codes. It also includes the building of a student housing complex at the Victoria Hospital.

The PAPHR carries a more than $1.5 million deficit from the last fiscal year, which is less than one per cent of the total operating budget.

To see the full budget, click here

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