Dear Colleagues,
I think that everyone is aware of the difficult economic circumstances facing our provincial government. We are concerned about the impact of the current economic situation on hospital funding and we are preparing to maintain our hospital programs and staffing in the face of potential funding shortfalls. It's important to your Senior Management Team that we are straightforward with all of you about these challenges and what we are planning to do.
In the next two years, we will plan our budgets and operations according to the following principles; 1) we will avoid deficits; 2) we will maintain clinical activity at budgeted levels; 3) we will avoid involuntary job loss.
In order to protect full-time jobs as well as maintaining our commitments to patients we will need to very carefully match our staffing to clinical activity. We will absolutely need to avoid overtime because we know that asking staff to work overtime has a very negative impact on employee satisfaction and on budget results. In order to avoid overtime we will be training some clinical staff to fill vacancies in acute care areas and also make better use of Nursing Resource Team members.
We expect to achieve a balanced budget position next year by paying very close attention to clinical volumes and staffing. The results of the recent accreditation have demonstrated that we have the best managers, directors and front-line staff to be found anywhere in the Canadian hospital system. Our goal is to maintain the excellent teamwork that we have developed over the past few years while we wait for the economy to improve.
Bob
