Hospital layoffs to impact 40 positions<\/a><\/p>\nNorth Bay Regional Health Centre president Paul Heinrich tells BayToday\u00a0that the changes\u00a0to their\u00a0financial approach are being made with an eye to\u00a0making sure there’ll\u00a0be zero impact on service.<\/p>\n
“We’ve announced no changes that would impact service. We’ve kind of gotten to the end of the opportunities now. So, these are\u00a0the changes we can make without impacting any services negatively.”<\/p>\n
To accomplish that,\u00a0 Heinrich says, one of the things they’ve\u00a0done is reach out to other hospitals.<\/p>\n
“It’s a responsibility of all hospitals, and we’ve always done this for years; we do peer benchmarking. We reached out to many hospitals across the province that are similar to us, and we found different practices. Some of the changes we’re making are skill mix changes.”<\/p>\n
For example, in\u00a0practical terms, that means the hospital\u00a0might investigate\u00a0Department X. and find\u00a0that another\u00a0organization is doing similar work with RPNs as opposed to RNs.\u00a0That’s an example of a skill mix the local hospital could modify to fit its needs.<\/p>\n
“We are constantly looking for efficiency improvements, and this is what we were able to find. I will make the point that we’re pretty close to the end of the road. There’s nothing further that we’re going to be able to find that would not impact services.”<\/p>\n
What Heinrich means by that is the hospital\u00a0board and administration are unwilling to make any further reductions in the\u00a0budget. He says he doesn’t\u00a0want to speculate on what the future is, but admits\u00a0there’s still a certain degree of uncertainty about what the budget will be,<\/p>\n
“I just want to tell you at this point in history, we’ve reached out and found best practices and efficiencies, and we’re applying them. And by the way, we recognize this has a real negative impact on morale in the short term. And we don’t take any of these changes lightly. They have a negative impact on individuals, and we’re going to do our best to minimize that impact by trying to manage this primarily through attrition.”<\/p>\n
Heinrich points to what he calls “an incredible increase” in the demand for services, plus\u00a0the complexity of patients has gone way up, citing multiple reasons.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got poor access to primary care. You’ve got so many factors. People are delaying care\u00a0that actually creates a more complex patient, so when they arrive, now our workload is higher, there’s more patients, and they’re more complex.”<\/p>\n
Heinrich says the hospital is going to soon embark upon a planning exercise to help define what its future growth and pressure is going to look like.<\/p>\n
“We have to be proactive and start planning for the future because there’s a huge increase in the demand for service coming at us over the next 14 years. In fact, it’s going to be something like 72 per cent\u00a0growth in the burden of chronic disease over the next 14 years. So the health system’s got to get ready.”<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
PHYSICIAN LEADERSHIP MODEL CHANGE<\/p>\n
\u00b7reducing the number of physician leadership positions effective January 1, 2026: reduction of 20% with no change in physician numbers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have done everything in our power to meet our financial target and find savings equal to 2% of our budget,\u201d says Paul Heinrich, President and CEO.<\/p>\n
\u201cHospitals face a number of complex challenges, including operational pressures, financial constraints, and an increased demand for services,\u201d Heinrich says. \u201cOur priority is always to protect and maintain access to health care.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heinrich says it is important to openly acknowledge the stress this causes for our staff, physicians, volunteers, and patients. \u201cNBRHC is focused on working collaboratively with the Government of Ontario to find both funding and operational solutions to create a more innovative and sustainable future for the communities we serve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the announced changes is a physician\u00a0leadership model change.<\/p>\n
“These are all practicing physicians that we asked to do leadership roles. So we have right now department chiefs, we have five\u00a0departments, emergency, primary care, psychiatry, surgery, and medicine. And each of those departments has a medical director and a chief of department. What we’ve decided to do is to combine those 10 roles into five by combining those positions to make one incumbent do that administrative work. And yes, that will add to the burden for those physician leaders, but it’s actually an opportunity for people to reconsider their role,\u00a0and we’ll be saving money. So big credit goes to our chief of staff and our medical advisory committee for showing leadership here and doing their part.”<\/p>\n
Heinrich admits not everybody is happy with these changes,<\/p>\n
“As with any change, there is some concern at the beginning. I know there’s not universal\u00a0happiness about the change, but I would say that there’s better than average positive reaction once you start working through it and consider it, and talk to people. We were very iterative and inclusive about the discussion. And like I said, not everyone’s happy, but I think most people are comfortable with the decision that was taken.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an effort to meet provincial budget targets, the NBRHC will undergo structural changes over the next six…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-93822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}