The leadership team of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance is disappointed by the statements made on Thursday by the Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, regarding Wallaceburg’s hospital.
Rob Devitt, the provincially-appointed supervisor for the CKHA, told the Sydenham Current he wanted to “set the record straight” about comments made by Horwath in this Sydenham Current article: Ontario NDP leader: Wallaceburg’s hospital is ‘losing out’
Disappointed by ‘misinformation’
“I’m a little disappointed that there appears to be a fair bit of misinformation about this whole hospital designation,” Devitt said.
“As someone who knows the nuances about hospital funding inside and out, I thought it was really important to set the record straight.
Devitt said no one from Horwath’s camp contacted the CKHA prior to the press conference she held outside of the Sydenham Campus in Wallaceburg on Thursday.
“I actually learned about the event through the Sydenham Current. No one called us, no one thought to call to check the facts. So, unfortunately it’s not accurate. I also appreciate that so much has been happening in Chatham-Kent over the last year when it comes to health care. I can see how people maybe haven’t connected the dots.”
Small/rural hospital designation a non-issue
Devitt said the the designation of the Sydenham Campus as a small and rural hospital, is a non-issue.
“In terms of the small and rural designation, in my view and from my understanding of the funding implications, it’s really not an issue,” he said.
“There was a time some years ago, where hospitals with a small and rural designation had access to a fund of money that was one-time money. In other words, you get it in a fiscal year but it is not renewed. It’s like getting a one-time bonus.”
Devitt said the change in designation for the Sydenham Campus occurred during a three-year span when the funding was available, which resulted in CKHA losing out on some one-time money.
Devitt said Jerome Quenneville, the vice president and chief financial officer for the CKHA, looked back to provide a “generous” estimate of what the CKHA failed to receive.
“His estimate is the most we lost out on was $300,000 of one-time money. This is assuming everything goes our way, none of the money is retained by the LHIN to invest in community service or community agencies, which happened in other LHINs,” Devitt said.
“In contrast, when you look at what you know has happened and has been in the public domain, because we have been so transparent, I contrast that to the investments we’ve been able to make because the two hospitals are now part of a system. Our whole mantra in the last year has been, we’re one team, two sites. That is why you’ve seen a complete change in terms of investments in Wallaceburg.”
“I contrast the one time $300,000 with the $390,000 in on-going base funding that we’ve been able to invest in the Wallaceburg site for the respiratory service, plus the $80,000 in one time funding to buy equipment for the respiratory service, plus the $1.8 million that was just announced for facility upgrades from the Ministry, and all of that money has come because we’ve been working with the LHIN and the Ministry as one team, two sites as opposed to two separate sites.”
Devitt added: “When I look at all that, I say in terms of strengthening service, developing the foundation for a long range, viable, sustainable set of services in Wallaceburg, personally I think it is obvious the route we’ve taken far exceeds, in terms of benefit for the community, this one-time funding. Really the issue around designation, the best metaphor I can give you for it, it is debating the style of text of the blue ‘H’. Is it an Arial or is it a Times Roman? It’s a blue ‘H’, it’s irrelevant to service provision, it has had no impact on funding for other services.”
Devitt said it was unfortunate they were not able to have the chance to lay out the numbers and compare.
“We could’ve cleared up any misunderstanding,” he said.
“Any suggestion that we’re out millions of dollars is just false. In fact, we’re in the good for millions of dollars. In fact, that is where I think we’ve seen things working. We’re very meticulous, we’re very precise in all our figures and estimates and also very thoughtful. Arguably, when you look at what we’ve foregone frankly it pales in comparison to what was spent on interest because of all the debt that was racked up from the previous boards.”
Devitt said moving forward, if the designation for the Sydenham Campus was changed back to a small and rural hospital, it would make no difference.
“There is not additional money coming forward,” he said.
“Frankly, having things the way they are now makes it easier for us to take system investments and allocate them to play catch up with some of the gaps that have happened over the years in Wallaceburg. The best example of that is the $390,000 per year that we’re now spending on respiratory services, the needed investment. It’s easier to do that when we are not getting segmented so much for this, so much for that.”
Devitt said he points to thenewly formed rural health advisory committee as another example of the CKHA trying to engage with all the communities and residents setvices by the hospital.
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Single payroll system
… Horwath said the rationale that the Liberal government used to justify “stripping services from this community was essentially that keeping the accounting clear between Sydenham and Chatham was too complex to even bother….
In response to this comment made by Horwath in the Sydenham Current, Quenneville said the CKHA has a single payroll system that covers everything.
“We move staff between the sites when needed in order to support service delivery… so, x-ray techs, clinical staff moved between sites, so that they can get a broader range of experience,” he said.
“With our payable system being on the same system, we’ll buy in bulk for supplies and be able to move stuff between sites. Certainly, that has the ability to have some real savings for the organization as a whole. Certainly the value add of following in detail how much time does our accounting staff do as far as support of one facility versus the other, really isn’t a value add in trying to track that. We tend to deal with it more on an organizational, across the two sites basis.”
Quenneville said anything that they’d be tracking individually, “would simply be allocations.
“It really doesn’t add a lot of value. It doesn’t contribute to patient care. If we want to keep our focus on supporting patient care, we should spend our time making those kind of efficiencies,” he said.
Devitt added: “We’ve been integrated with our financials for some time and payroll is a perfect example. We’re one employer, we’re one payroll. To take money and try to precisely disengage one place’s numbers versus another, means we’d be spending money on accounting and clerical service and not on patient care. I’d rather take the approach of what is the right approach in terms of service and quality, rather than spending it on administrative overhead. When we do report separately, it’s just arbitrary. We’ll say this percentage is for this, this percentage is for that. It’s purely arbitrary and it doesn’t add value to improvement.”
Not involved in partisan politics
With the 2018 provincial election just around the corner, Devitt said he doesn’t pay attention to politics.
“I don’t think about partisan politics one bit,” he said.
“That is not what I’m there to do nor is that what the senior team and the leaders of the Alliance are there to do. We’re disappointed that misinformation is out there, but our job is to continue the improvement path that we’re on, continue to find ways to strengthen service and solve the financial problems we inherited when we started. The data is abundantly clear, the issue in Chatham-Kent isn’t funding, the issue in Chatham-Kent is we have an organization that is an outlier in terms of productivity and cost relative to similar hospitals in Ontario. That is not an issue for partisanship, that is an issue for public administration.”
Devitt added: “My hope is in the future, anybody, an interest group, any group… we’re pretty open, all our stuff is on askckha.com, hopefully as we go forward people will work with us and talk to us and we’ll have all the facts out there. This designation thing is just a non-issue.”
– Photo credit: Aaron Hall
