There has to be a case made to stop the heavy flow of health-care customers from so-called rural Saskatchewan, into our province's two major centres.
We purposely refer to them as customers, since that is exactly what they are. They are consumers of health care and where they go, the dollars follow.
We are not so naive as to think that centres other than Regina and Saskatoon should, or could, stock up a supply of medical specialists, That's just not possible. But there is obviously something wrong with a system that continually finds the hospitals in these two cities full to overflowing while hospitals in Prince Albert, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Yorkton, Estevan and Weyburn are rarely filled to capacity and are capable of providing more extensive health-care coverage than what is being asked of them.
It just doesn't compute, and it hasn't computed for years.
Why is there a health-care community out there that still insists on sending patients/customers down the road for five hours to see a specialist for seven minutes? All this in the new Lean era ... the era when health regions are supposedly learning how to do things in the most efficient manner. They could start with that. With modern communications, visual, digital, audio tools at our beck and call through Telehealth and other operative systems ... why are we sending customers bearing mixed messages into Regina in snowstorms? That's not Lean in any stretch of the imagination. It's a cost to the care system and a big cost to the customer.
Why are our most costly acute care beds being used for clients who really require long-term care beds? Apparently there are not enough of those available to serve that growing population? That's not Lean.
Where is the incentive to get these articles of inefficiency tended to? Is there a need to reimburse private personal care homes with public funds to get the job done? Is there a way to align financial support for long-term care providers with those of hospitals? Are there any financial incentives for long-term care facilities to accept and provide for patients (customers) with complex problems that require more intensive care? If not, why not?
Would it not be seen as an efficient Lean move to take those people out of an expensive hospital bed and place them in a long-term care facility that could offer them what they really needed while giving the service provider enough support to make it an agreeable deal rather than a financial burden?
We are sure there is no health-care model that is perfect. We have publicly funded doctors and hospitals and some publicly funded long-term care providers and some privately funded seniors complexes. Someone needs to make these four factions work together to ease the financial pressure.
We need to quit sending rural health customers into Regina when they could more easily and efficiently be helped in other cities by deploying a little of this much hyped Lean planning.
Our health care budget provides one envelope of cash for hospitals, one for doctors, another for rehabilitation and yet another for home care and still another for long-term care. Then along comes private medical models, paid for with public dollars. Stuff another envelope.
With all these pay packets, where is the financial incentive to be efficient?
Neither Lean or any other model has been able to provide those answers. We suspect they'll only be found when our health care community can correspond costs and payments to the efficiency of care.
