In savings drive, regional health authorities cut water, coffee, hard-copy journal subscriptions

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/09/2017 (2407 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The regional health authorities still don’t have approval to make cuts to clinical services, but that isn’t stopping them from chipping small-line items off their operating budgets in a bid to meet provincial savings targets.

Across Manitoba, tea, coffee, water coolers and hard-copy journal subscriptions have fallen prey to belt-tightening measures.

In March, Southern Health-Santé Sud told staff once they’d finished their water supply, they’d have to take their own water to work. An email obtained through freedom of information requests indicates the La Broquerie regional office was stripped not just of water coolers and bottles, but coffee decanters and machines as well.

“Certainly this wasn’t the first thing we jumped on,” Southern Health vice-president of finance and planning Ken Klassen said, “There’s obviously bigger fish out there.”

But the province instructed Southern Health to find $11 million in annual savings, so in a bid to meet that target, it went carefully back through its expenses.

Klassen said the authority has known since it was created out of the 2012 merger of South Eastman and Central Manitoba regional health authorities it was paying for water coolers and coffee for staff in some locations but not others.

He made it clear patients have had, and will always have, access to water.

The province’s savings target, Klassen said, served somewhat as an incentive to move “toward cleaning things up.” A full water cull is expected to save roughly $20,000 per year.

That’s slightly less than at the Northern Regional Health Authority, where bottled water and leased water cooler savings are estimated to exceed $25,000 annually. That water was for staff and facility visitors, a spokeswoman told the Free Press. She said it was staff that suggested it as a way to save. The province has instructed the authority to cut $6 million annually from its budget.

A spokesman for Prairie Mountain Health said it does not cover water costs for staff, while a spokeswoman for the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority said water-delivery service and the rental of water coolers ended in June 2016, prior to the government’s saving mandate.

She wasn’t certain how much was saved, given the water expenses were included in the region’s overall office expenses budget and would need to be teased out.

Still, both Southern Health and the Northern Health expect to save more from water cuts than by axing whole programs.

In the south, the end of the Salem Home Meals on Wheels program will save an estimated $11,000 annually, while the north expects to save at most $3,000 a year after cutting its Bounty Hunter program.

That program, which was a holdover from before the authority’s 2013 amalgamation and offers a financial incentives for staff to encourage select other health professionals to move north for work, was ineffectual, a spokeswoman said. “We had less than two referrals each year.”

Southern Health also cut two adult day programs — one each in Morden and Winkler — for a combined expected savings of roughly $178,000 annually.

A note sent by both facilities to program participants, explained the closures were because new supports had been put in place in the decades since the programs began.

“We’ve tried to be as efficient as possible,” said Klassen, noting Southern Health has balanced its budget every year since the 2012 merger. “The announcements earlier this year on funding reductions… certainly did force us to take a deeper look at things.”

Still, the fiscal year is almost halfway through and the provincial government has yet to approve the bulk of the saving measures the predominantly rural regional health authorities have put forward.

A spokeswoman for Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen told the Free Press this week the process is ongoing. Shared Health Services Manitoba, the new provincial organization announced in the summer that’s expected to be up and running by April, has been tasked with reviewing and approving proposed clinical cuts.

In an earlier interview with the Free Press, Goertzen said Shared Health Services is reviewing non-WRHA cuts because of the rural considerations.

“Their systems are a little bit different,” he said.

“The WRHA has a good deal of resources, a greater ability to work through what some of the impacts are and what the ramifications are to the system because they have those resources internally.”

Goertzen said he was initially “less comfortable” with some of the savings options presented rurally and felt a system analysis was warranted. If that means not all the health authorities make their savings target this year, then so be it.

“If it impacts the budget from the rural perspective and a little bit from Winnipeg then that’s what it does, it impacts the budget,” he said. “I’m not going to allow for a decision that we don’t believe has gone through the sort of clinical analysis that it needs to.”

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca