Sudbury Regional Hospital CEO Vickie Kaminski and chief of staff Dr. Chris McKibbon recently spoke to Northern Life managing editor Vicki Gilhula and reporter Heidi Ulrichsen. The following is part two of that conversation.
NL: Construction on the one-site hospital was originally slated to re-commence this spring. Why was it pushed back to late 2005?
Kaminski: Part of it is the re-organization that we have to do. The only way this government and community can afford construction is if we downsized the size of the building. And to do that meant we had to get rid of some beds.
What we did was offer to move our complex continuing care program out. And that?s moving to the St. Joseph?s Villa.
We had to go back to the drawing board literally and come up with new sketch plans for phase two. And because we had to do that dramatic change, we had to go through the whole process with the government again for approvals.
And they are slow. They think they can do it in three weeks, and it ends up taking 12.
Because the second phase was going to cost so much, we have to go out and re-tender. We?re not going to use the construction management methodology that we had for phase one with the same general contractor. We may end up with the same general contractor, but it will be through a competitive bidding process.
NL: Ideally, when will the construction be completed?
Kaminski: Two years after it starts. The end of 2007, that?s a pretty realistic target. Now we may not have all of the buildings offsite completely emptied out and destroyed, but we will have by that point most of our patient services located at Laurentian site.
NL: What advantages will the one-site hospital have?
McKibbon: I think the medical community for a long time has been championing both the efficiencies and the improvements that will happen on one site.
As it stands now, people move between sites to get different kinds of care. Mother nature didn?t really believe your heart would be (looked after) in one building and your bowel would be somewhere else.
Intuitively, we know if we can bring an organization together where all of the services are in one site, that the convenience for the patient, the quality of care in terms of being efficient and being timely, should improve.
It?s also very important in terms of our ability to recruit and retain physicians.
When we do exit interviews with doctors who have decided to re-locate to other communities, there are many reasons that they give us.
Many of them are family, many of them are personal, many of them are weather, other opportunities, but one of the ongoing themes has been the struggle to provide care across multiple sites.
NL: Would it have been easier to go to one site if there hadn?t been three changes in government in the past 15 years?
Kaminski: In 1997, we got the directions from the HRSC to go with one site, and they said you should be on one site in three years. According to them, in the year 2000, we should have been on one site.
But I?m not sure how much the government change impacted it, although they did have to stop and re-visit policy and...you had to reassure the new government that you weren?t wasting money.
I think the change in the management team contributed, I think the change in the board contributed, and I think some of the change in the government contributed, for sure.
NL: Will you have to borrow money to make up the 20 percent of construction costs not funded by the government?
Kaminski: There?s going to be a shortfall in the funding, no question. The government?s decision to go to 80 percent funding was very good news, and narrows that gap, but we will still have a gap that we have to fund.
We have a number of options, but I think borrowing it is probably the only real option that we have, given the size of the difference.
See Sunday?s issue for part three of this conversation about health care, Sudbury Regional Hospital and the new governance structure. Read Sunday's article here>>
