On Mismanagement of Health Care |
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Nipawin - March 4, 2000 - By: Mario deSantis | |
every provincial premier agrees that healthcare is underfunded | The Alberta government has just tabled The Health Protection Act Bill 11 which will allow |
privately run for profit clinics. This legislation has been prompted by the governmental claim | |
that health care is underfunded and that the establishment of private clinics will protect the public | |
system. Federal Minister of Health Alan Rock has reservations about the introduction of this | |
legislation, however every provincial premier agrees that healthcare is underfunded. | |
inept politicians and incompetent bureaucrats |
Our past articles have provided evidence that healthcare has been mismanaged for very many |
years. Our inept politicians and incompetent bureaucrats have compounded the health care state | |
of confusion by blaming underfunding all along, rather than looking at themselves in the mirror. | |
While our flip-flop Premier Roy Romanow is preaching across Canada the gospel that Medicare | |
is underfunded by the federal government, I am happy to realise that few people in Saskatchewan | |
have the common sense to state that something is basically wrong with health care. | |
ongoing mismanagement of health resources | Dr. Stan Oleksinski, president of the Saskatchewan Medical Association, has rightly stated that |
the present mess in health care should be attributed to the ongoing mismanagement of health | |
resources(1), and Glen Beck, professor of health economics at the University of Saskatchewan, | |
has stated that the reciprocal blaming between health districts and the government over health | |
care funding cannot be sustained(2). Our health care articles have focused on Saskatchewan, | |
and I find relevant the fact that whatever I have stated for Saskatchewan, has Canadian wide | |
implications as well. | |
they didn't save a dime | Friday morning, I have visited the CBC(3) Web site and I noticed that Nova Scotia has parallel |
health care problems to Saskatchewan's. We integrated health services through the Regina | |
Hospital and instead, to save money, we incurred a $50 million overrun; in Halifax, the Nova | |
Scotia government merged four hospitals into the Queen Elizabeth II to save money and they | |
didn't save a dime. In the last few years we down sized health care workers in the name of a | |
re-engineering process called the Saskatchewan Health Information Network (SHIN) with the | |
result of having a shortage of nurses along with the flushing of some $40 million into the | |
toilette(4); in Nova Scotia, the Queen Elizabeth II hospital has an operating deficit of $26 | |
millions and it has a debt of $140 million. | |
fictitious dollar savings | Guess what? The Nova Scotia government knows that 70 percent of this hospital budget goes |
toward salaries, so the strategic plan is to cut costs by cutting staff. Does it sound familiar? | |
Yes, it sounds very familiar, it is just the continuation of a corrupted governmental and | |
bureaucratic administration which trades people's lives for fictitious dollar savings. | |
-------------Endnotes: | |
General reference: Articles by Mario deSantis published by North Central Internet News | |
Saskatchewan Healthcare: Breaking the Law & Mismanagement, by Mario deSantis, January 20, 2000 | |
An advice to our leaders and bureaucrats: Stop managing by the number game and begin managing by your stories, by Mario deSantis, February 29, 2000 | |
On February 10, 1999, Newsworld provided special coverage of health care in Canada. http://cbc.ca/news/indepth/healthcare/ Accessed March 3, 2000 | |
Nursing Shortage: Shifting the blame for our own Incompetence, by Mario deSantis, November 27, 1999 | |
---------Editor's Comment: | |
Mr. deSantis wrote this material Friday afternoon and forwarded it to Ensign for
inclusion in the Saturday edition. Ironically, late Friday afternoon the Minister
of Health for Saskatchewan, Pat Atkinson, announced the closure of Carrot River's
hospital. The hospital had lost its ability to handle emergency situation when it
lost one of its two doctors a few month's back. An attempt to fill this vacancy
has failed and so the minister is downgrading the facility to a "health centre"
which simply means it will provide care to long term hospitallised individuals and
that will be about the extent of its usefulness No services on weekends, (it will
sort of be like North Battleford at Christmas.) This is a chronic blow to Carrot
River which is not loosing population but remains a vibrant industrial community. With the closing of Carrot River the province has seen the closing of fifty-five hospitals and since this process began the cost of health care in Saskatchewan has escalated proportionately to the closure of facilities. (Prior to the closures the cost of health care was below 33% of the provincial budget it now exceeds 40%. )With the announcement of this closure and this morning the minister was voicing her severe disappointment with the federal budget and its support for provincial health care programming, one wonders what sort of logic is being applied. You will no doubt hear from various authorities that Saskatchewan's population is to small to warrant the high number of medical facilities in place and that fewer will cost less to operate. Saskatchewan's million souls are scattered over an area only slightly smaller then all of Western Europe. Small efficient health care facilities cost far less to operate then large ones and the cost of transportation greatly reduces appropriate medical response and with facilities operated only to meet the demands of the day before, any minor difficulty is beyond capacity. (A knife fight in a Regina neighbourhood a couple of years ago produced six victims and that exceed the city's ability to handle even this small emergency.) Mr. deSantis has at various times expressed exasperation at the failure of both government and health administrators to realise that what they are doing is counter productive yet we see them proceed blindly to not only follow the same erroneous path but to compound it with doing more of the same making a bad situation worse.
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