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No money for Estevan nursing home in provincial budget

Status quo situation not unexpected, say health care leaders
Sun Country Health Region
The Sun Country Health Region will not be receiving any extra funding through the recently announced provincial budget.

No new money will be flowing into the Sun Country Health Region as a result of this year’s provincial budget that was brought down by Finance Minister Ken Krawetz on March 18.

“Well, there is that $500,000 for the preliminary planning for a new hospital in Weyburn, but otherwise, it will be a status quo situation,” said the health region’s CEO Marga Cugnet who spoke with the Mercury on March 20.

The half million for the planning kick-starts the process, and since the citizens of Weyburn have now raised over $20 million that will represent a perceived 20 per cent cost of building a new acute care facility in that city.

“We will hire a consultant and there will be a community and staff team involved to start the process and the actual planning can now begin,” said Cugnet.

With the hospital project underway, the path is now clear for a new regional nursing home to be built in Estevan, to rise to the No. 1 position on the health region’s capital project priority list, since long term care facilities in Redvers and Radville are now complete and a new primary care facility in Kipling is nearing completion.

“There is nothing else except the ERNH on the list right now,” said Cugnet.

Estevan’s drive to be the home for a CT scanner at St. Joseph’s Hospital, has been successful.

Greg Hoffort, executive director at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Estevan, said the $2  to $2.2 million CT scanner project will include the necessary renovations and installation. The selection committee has seen a variety of scanners being offered by three different manufacturers and it is expected that the winning contractor will be announced sometime in April.

“That puts our schedule of having it in place and readied for operation, back a bit,” said Hoffort. “But it should be ready by late spring, early summer.”

He said the slight delay might be attributed to the fact that Estevan is working in concert with Prince Albert in the procurement of scanners in both locations and now a couple of other health regions are looking for replacement scanners, so they too, are joining the team to provide the province with a more efficient bidding and purchase stance. The money to purchase the scanner was raised in Estevan and the immediate surrounding region, so Sun Country will only be responsible for the operating costs after installation.

“It hasn’t been determined yet who will be reading the and interpreting the images. It will be a radiology company in Regina and the images will be sent online to them with diagnostics returned the same way,” Hoffort said.

Now as far as budget increases are concerned, the hospital’s director said “we don’t expect a lot of extra, more like the status quo. We get about $16 million from the province through Sun Country and we get about $1 million more from billing for our out-of-province patients. That will probably be reduced this year because of the downturn in the oil patch.”

St. Joseph’s operates as an affiliate of Sun Country and therefore funding for it through the health region is handled as a separate entity on their financial records.

Cugnet said she expected a very tight year, but noted,  the principle of leadership in Sun Country is to not lay off employees unless, the situation becomes desperate, and that is certainly not the situation. She said some positions that come open through attrition may not be filled to save some dollars, but that has been done before under tight financial circumstances.

“We can also address such items as sick leave and find other efficiencies in the system,” she said.

Cugnet said she didn’t foresee any need to reduce or cut base services such as chemotherapy or dialysis service time allocations.

“Our budget will probably be around $150 million from all sources of revenue by the time we have our new health region budget ready to go to the board in May,” she said.

The board of directors is conducting their March business session in Estevan today (March 25). The open business meetings are usually conducted in the regional headquarters at Tatagwa View in Weyburn.