For the second time in two days a London hospital has announced staff cuts to deal with a budget shortfall.
On Wednesday, St. Joseph's Health Care announced job cuts and bed closures. On Thursday, the London Health Sciences Centre announced it is also having to reduce staff to balance the books.
The LHSC says it needs to find $20-million in savings in a $1.2-billion budget in order to avoid going into the red. The hospital's plan to achieve a balanced budget presumes that funding from the province will be in line with what it received last year. A release from the LHSC says this will mark the fifth straight year that provincial funding has not kept up with inflation.
"These are challenging times and we worked hard to ensure that the tough decisions we made will allow us to continue to improve access and flow and care for our patients,"says Murray Glendining, LHSC President and CEO. "We are committed to working with all system partners to further advance the comprehensive work that has been underway at LHSC and regionally for the last two years to improve clinical services, streamline access and flow and enhance the patient experience, as we continue to manage our financial health."
The hospital says there will be a reduction in staff hours equivalent to 64.5 full time positions, the majority of which are non-clinical. It is expecting to achieve these reductions through normal attrition with a minimal amount of involuntary layoffs.
"We are very confident," says Glendining. "If you look at the turnover rates of staff in an organization of this size, the timing may not be exactly what we would like, but we will do the vast majority of this without layoffs. We do attempt to impact front line staff and patients as little as we can. The majority of these savings are not front line clinical staff. But for me to stand up and say 'we're going to pull $20-million out and not have any impact on front line staff or patients' would not be correct. There will be an impact but we are doing all we can to mitigate that."
The hospital aims to cut spending by 1.5% across the board, reduce its supply costs, save money at the administrative level, expand the contracting out of cleaning services, and move employees from off-site locations to the hospital in order to end lease payments. Glendining says the repatriation of staff from off-site locations should save $1-million.
