To the Editor:
As we transition to one provincial Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) in December, health care workers are anxious about yet another health care experiment by this government.
The government claims merging 12 health regions into one will save between $10 to $20 million in executive salaries and board expenses, a drop in the $4 billion health care budget. Now the new SHA CEO tells us the restructuring is not about saving money but allowing “patients to move seamlessly through the system.”
Improving patient care is important, but we’ve been sold this bill of goods before.
The health system-wide implementation of Lean or Kaizen methods, which morphed into Continuous Quality Improvement, was also supposed to improve patient care and save millions of dollars.
Numbers we obtained from an Access to Information (ATI) request to the Ministry of Health show that in 2015-16, there were 190.7 full-time staff working in Kaizen in the province. Salary and benefits for these employees totalled $54.24 million from 2012-2015. The number of Kaizen staff was reduced to 138.3 in 2017, but we estimate total salary and benefit costs since 2012 were $94 million. This doesn’t include the cost to implement Lean, estimated by University of Saskatchewan professors at between $44 and $49.6 million.
To put this into perspective, the amount spent on 190 Kaizen staff in 2015-16 would have been enough to pay for 405 full time continuing care aides in long-term care, where there are crushing workloads and a desperate need for more one-on-one care for seniors.
Sandra Seitz, Weyburn
President of the CUPE Health Care Council
