IWK AGM recognizes achievements, challenges
Posted Oct 26, 2011 02:23:37 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The region’s women and children’s hospital celebrated its successes and looked ahead to a tough budget year ahead as the IWK held its annual general meeting.
Health & Wellness Minister Maureen MacDonald laid out the praise and recognized coming cutbacks. She’s told health authorities they have to cut 3 per cent from their next budgets.
“We have to deal with the present,” said MacDonald. “And the present is one in which we have, as a province, declining revenues.”
MacDonald says spending has increased faster than revenues.
“Your budget, for example, here at the IWK, in ten years has gone from $99 million to today, $189 million,” said MacDonald.
IWK CEO Anne McGuire says the hospitals and government will work together to find the savings.
“There are probably some things we do that don’t yield great returns for the investment that we’ve made,” said McGuire. “We’ll focus on ambulatory (care). Because we have many many ambulatory clinics and nobody’s really looked at them for the past number of years. They’ve just kind of grown like topsy. Probably, we can do some combining and work with our space more efficiently, et cetera.”
McGuire says every other expenditure will be double-checked. She says some jobs may be lost.
“We’re going to try, as we did the last time, to use attrition,” she said. “We have natural turnover, so we can use a lot of those. Last time, more than half of the people that were affected were actually vacant positions.”
