The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The publicly owned clinic at the Flin Flon General Hospital has cost taxpayers more than promised, but the head of the Northern Health Region says it is worth it. In its first fiscal year of 2011-12, the clinic cost the NRHA, now part of the NHR, $877,082. That's $263,908, or 43 per cent, more than the fees paid the previous year to the privately owned clinic on Church Street. Costs for 2012-13 were not immediately available, but the NHR said they were similar to those of the prior year. 'We are spending more operationally on the clinic than we had initially anticipated,' said Helga Bryant, CEO of the NHR. 'We are also, though, providing 300 per cent more service.' Bryant said a 300 per cent rise in patient visits has necessitated additional employees _ at least six to eight of them _ not originally on staff. Among others, she said the clinic required an employee to manage the electronic health records that replaced the old paper files. The end result, Bryant said, is a clinic that has ensured access to physicians, addressing what was once a major concern among residents. See 'App...' on pg. Continued from pg. 'Anyone moving to Flin Flon today could phone the clinic and get a 30-minute appointment with a physician in two days,' she said. 'That doesn't happen anywhere else in Manitoba.' There are different ways to look at the operating expenses of the new clinic, based on the third floor of the hospital. While the cost is higher than at the old clinic, it is also $313,082, or 56 per cent, more than what the NRHA projected to spend, on average, for each of the first five years of the hospital-based facility. If the NRHA had purchased and run the old clinic, an option once discussed, its projections show it would have spent an average of $786,000 in each of the first five years. Actual costs at the new clinic have exceeded that amount by $91,082, or 10 per cent. In making the case for the new clinic back in 2010, the NRHA said the facility would save taxpayers $250,000 or more per year. The annual tab at the new clinic has Ryan Watt, an advocate of the old clinic, asking questions. Excluding one-time costs, Watt said the regular management fee at the old clinic amounted to $536,700 in its final year of operation. Using that figure, he said the new clinic costs $340,372 more per year than its predecessor, a 63 per cent increase. 'All this additional money would have better served our community for our aging infrastructure, but that money comes from the empty pot, not the endless pot of public money,' Watt said. Watt also pointed to statements the NRHA made in 2010 indicating the new clinic could operate with less staff than the old clinic thanks to an operational model known as Advance Access. 'This isn't the first clinic the province has operated with Advance Access, so how can there be such a variance in the budgeted numbers?' he said. NHR spokesperson Glenn Hildebrand said the path taken with the new clinic was so different from what was initially planned that the old financial projections are no longer relevant. 'We set out to build 'x' and we ended up building 'y' and that's why the comparability (of dollar projections) is so much harder,' he said. Bryant used a different analogy, saying that while the original plan was for 'a little convenience store on the corner,' the end result has been 'a Walmart Supercentre.' 'And that costs more money,' she said. Bryant said Flin Flon has now met the province-wide goal of ensuring every Manitoban has access to a doctor by 2015. She said she is now working on meeting that goal in The Pas and Thompson, the two other major communities within the NHR. Another benefit of increased volume at the clinic, Bryant said, is a 30 per cent reduction in visits to the ER. All capital costs to build the new clinic were covered by the provincial government.
