The head of the South West Local Health Integration Network says the provincial budget will mean some challenges ahead for hospitals.
Hospitals will receive a funding increase of 1.5 per cent, less than what had been hoped.
Michael Barrett — speaking at the Owen Sound and District Chamber of Commerce’s annual general meeting Thursday night — says that although hospitals have already spent many years trying to find efficiencies in their operations in order to balance their budgets, there is still more work to be done.
Barrett says more collaborations with other health care partners is one avenue
although he acknowledges that hospital corporations like Grey Bruce Health Services already do an exemplary job in that area.
In fact, he says, the working relationships between GBHS and the other hospital corporations in the Twin Counties – the South Bruce Grey Health Centre and the Hanover and District Hospital – are so good that they should really serve as a model for other corporations in Ontario.
Barrett also has high hopes for further health system integration when the rural health centre in Markdale is finally built.
It’ll combine a hospital and a community care centre in one facility, making collaboration easier and also hopefully enticing health professionals to the area.
Much of Barrett’s talk at the chamber of commerce AGM focused on what the LHIN is and what it does.
It provides health system leadership for almost one million people in a geographic region that extends from Long Point in the south, on Lake Erie, to Tobermory – an area spanning 22 thousand square kilometres.
75 per cent of the LHIN’s funding in this fiscal year – 1.46 billion dolars – goes to hospitals.