3-year plan to balance the budget
The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance is in a financial crunch.
Adam Topp, president and CEO for CKHA, said the recent reduction of eight management positions will shave about $1 million out of the alliance’s annual spending, but he and his team are looking for more.
About $5 million more, as that’s the deficit CKHA faces.
“We’re continuing to look at ways to address the remaining $5-million deficit we’re projecting this year,” he said, adding staff reductions are certainly not being ruled out. “The positions we eliminated earlier were management positions. I think there may be other non-management positions that may be announced, but I don’t have any details at this time.”
Topp said the reality that a hospital’s biggest expense is payroll.
“Seventy-five per cent of our expenses are people,” he said. “There may well be positions eliminated in the organization. We’d certainly do our best to eliminate them over a period of time, using attrition, and looking at vacancies.”
In terms of job vacancies at CKHA, Topp reported a vacancy rate of under two per cent for the hospital overall, including among the registered nursing staff.
Other avenues are also being explored.
“We’re looking at ways to raise revenue and be more efficient across the board. We’ve started to implement some activities in terms of making sure we have the best group purchasing plan,” Topp said of supply acquisition. “We’re looking at any avenues we can possibly address to add revenue. But we don’t have a lot of revenue options.”
Topp said when a hospital runs at a deficit, it puts infrastructure and equipment needs and maintenance on the backburner.
“We can’t make those investments (in new equipment) if we’re running a deficit. We do need to balance the budget,” he said.
Topp said CKHA has a three-year plan to wipe out the deficit.
“Of course, over those three years we have to deal with inflation and growing costs in terms of salary,” he said. “We can’t invest in the capital to maintain our infrastructure and maintain our equipment unless we are at least balanced. Otherwise staff and patients are getting frustrated in terms of getting access to functioning equipment.”
The previous fiscal year, the hospital ran a $13-million deficit. But thanks to what Topp said was a “significant investment from the province, about $1 billion – and we got our fair share – that helped bring down the deficit.”
There were additional one-time expenditures and issues, Topp added. That includes the information breach that impacted hospitals from Windsor to Sarnia.
If the hospital could only do is to Stop making promises that the hospital can’t keep they would be in a better outcome imaginable
How can u even think of cutting staff they are over worked now. Ive had to be hospitalized this year 4 times and my heart goes out to the doctors and nurses. The moral is awful and I cant blame them, last time I was there they had a woman either with alzheimers I think in a medical ward it was awful for the staff and the patient convalencing.