New leaders of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance are working hard to pay down their debt.
Supervisor Rob Devitt says through a reduction in management costs and recent funding announcements, they’re able to reduce the debt by $2 million dollars.
“This is a major milestone to be able to roll the line of credit back from $10-million to $8-million is a huge first step,” Devitt says. “In some ways we’ve done the easy part, but it’s a really important step and we need to keep doing this so that the community gets best practices in terms of service delivery.”
Devitt says the key to reducing the rest of the debt is to at least break even each fiscal year.
We haven’t got the audited statements yet, but we believe we’re going to finish (the fiscal year) at what we call a Ministry of Health break-even,” Devitt explains. “We have to get at a proper ongoing accounting break-even in order to get to a place where we have enough surplus cash to start paying down historical, long term debt.”
Devitt says under the old system, the hospital was using debt to finance operations, which simply was not sustainable.
