Approximately 70 people will be laid off by the Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) in an effort to close a roughly $30 million gap between its expenses and revenues, according to its CEO and president.
“This is affecting and impacting every area of the health region,” said CEO and President Dan Florizone to reporters late Thursday afternoon.
“These are areas where we’ve tried to preserve patient care, patient quality, but have looked at efficiency.”
Florizone said the health region planned to eliminate roughly 260 full-time positions, but were able to avoid that through freezing new job hiring, vacancy management and providing incentives for those who were interested in a voluntary separation program.
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Roughly 70 per cent of the health region’s costs are related to staffing and job cuts couldn’t be avoided said Florizone. He wouldn’t rule out that these would be the last layoffs.
Florizone said the only thing he could guarantee is the region would continue to work toward minimizing “any negative impact on patients and the quality of care we provide them and minimize the number of layoffs.”
“If I could avoid them all together, I’d be there in spades.”
Because some of the positions are unionized, Florizone said the exact number of layoffs from this round could be higher or lower than 70.
“I never want to leave the impression that the people that have been affected today weren’t contributing, they were contributing in a big way,” Florizone said.
“We’ve made decisions around how we deliver service, around the efficiency by which we deliver it.”
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The health region ended its 2015-16 fiscal year with a $35.7 million deficit. Florizone said that has been reduced, but by the end of last July the region realized they were still projecting a $30.8 million gap between expenses and revenues for its current fiscal year.
“As a health care delivery agency our obligation is to balance our budget and we will work every day to achieve that end,” Florizone said.
“The quality of care we provide is our number one priority and it will continue to be, but there’s no way we can achieve that without sound fiscal stewardship.”
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