Officials at the Chatham Kent Health Alliance are hoping for a better deal from the Ontario government.
CEO Lori Marshall says while the hospital is still expecting a balanced budget at the end of this fiscal year, they along with other medium-sized hospitals are hoping to figure out how to get the best bang for their provincial buck.
“There’s recognition that small hospitals can’t really create the economics of scale. So normally if there are increases, they would get an inflationary kind of increase. The larger hospitals, which tend to be in highly urban areas, they are able to benefit from growth of the populations and also by being able to have a sufficient amount of procedures in a certain area that they can do them highly efficiently,” explains Marshall.
Marshall says CKHA tends to operate more like a large hospital, but in a medium-sized community.
“We aren’t seeing the degree of population growth that you see in larger centres. For some procedures, we may not be doing as many as the larger hospitals, so the funding formula doesn’t work quite as well,” says Marshall.
