Picco: Health boards must tighten budgets

Health Minister Ed Picco says Nunavut’s health boards must convince him that they won’t run up more deficits if the Nunavut government decides to bail them out.

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

SEAN McKIBBON
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT — Nunavut Health Minister Ed Picco says he wants to know exactly where health board budgets are leaking money before he starts bailing them out with more money.

Nunavut’s three health and social services boards are reporting budget deficits this year.

The Baffin board is looking at a deficit of about $4.7 million. Picco says the Keewatin board has reported a deficit of $1.5 million, and the Kitikmeot board’s executive director, Alice Isnor, says her board will probably end up with a deficit of $1.2 million.

“The GN is moving aggressively to look at solutions for the funding shortfall the boards are experiencing,” Picco said.

But he said the Nunavut health department wants to see who the money is owed to and what the arrangements for repayment are first.

Analyzing budgets

Picco said his department is conducting an intensive analysis of health board budgets to find out if there are ways for them to save money.

Getting rid of loans with high interest payments was just one example, Picco said. Not painting or renovating health board offices is another. He also said Nunavut’s health boards might also look at more effective way of paying off debts to avoid unnecessary interest charges.

“You can only go to the well so many times,” said Picco. He said the Nunavut government doesn’t want to come to the rescue of the health boards only to have them incur more deficits by April 1 next year — when the boards are scheduled to dissolve.

Nunavut’s current health care woes stem from an historic underfunding of the system by the GNWT, Picco said. That opinion is shared by the health boards’ three chief executive officers.

But the boards also say that health care needs are increasing, staff turnover is high, and medical travel costs are going up.

“I think there probably some efficiencies we need to look at. But I don’t think they are that great,” said Keith Best, the CEO of the Kivalliq health board.

Nunavut health boards need to look at work-load measurements and administrative duplication, Best said. But he says that without more funding from the Nunavut government the deficits would still be there.

“Down to the bone”

“I think we’re pretty much down to the bone,” Jarvis Hoult, the CEO of the Baffin health board told board members in Iqaluit last week.

Hoult told a tale of increased medical travel costs, higher illness rates and high staff turnover, which in his opinion are interrelated.

Overworked nurses are concentrating on primary care and are unable to get out and do the health promotion work that could save some of the medical expenses the boards are facing in the first place, said Alice Isnor.

“There has to be some provision for increased health costs. We can’t go forever on the same budget we had in 1995,” she said.

Picco said he and his staff are working on a staff recruitment and retention program to address the concerns of front-line workers and keep them from leaving.

He also pointed to a new college nursing program being established to try to generate a pool of nurses within Nunavut so recruitment programs don’t have to go so far afield in their search for workers.

Picco also mentioned that while at a meeting of territorial and provincial health ministers in Charlottetown last week, he and other health ministers had asked federal health minister Allan Rock to restore territorial health care funding to 1994-1995 levels.

While he wasn’t sure how much money that might translate into for Nunavut, he said that 1995 was the year the federal government began cut-backs to territorial health care funding, and that a restoration of those funding levels would mean an increase for Nunavut.

Picco wouldn’t say where extra money would come from if the Nunavut government decides to step inand bail the boards out.

But he did say that primary care would not be affected by any deficit recovery programs put in place.

“There’s no need to fear-monger,” said Picco.

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