Grand River Hospital is a few weeks away from knowing exactly how much funding it will get from the province for the coming year.
But hospital executives suspect there won’t be enough money to continue the status quo – and they’re removing a number of beds and staff positions in preparation.
“We want to make sure we’re directing funds to patient care everywhere we can,” hospital president Malcolm Maxwell tells CTV News.
Ten beds are affected by the cuts, all at the hospital’s Freeport site.
Maxwell says the beds were introduced three years ago as a temporary measure to provide interim care for patients waiting for long-term care or home care services.
Since then, he says, wait times for those services have shortened – meaning patients can be cycled through Freeport more quickly, and the temporary beds aren’t as necessary.
“It would be nice to sustain the beds, but we’ve made changes that will allow us to respond to the patients who were using those beds,” he says.
Also affected are four associate vice-president-level staff positions.
The positions were created in 2008, and Maxwell says they’re no longer necessary at the hospital.
“We’ve caught up on the things that we created those positions to do,” he says.
Only one of the four associate vice-presidents is actually being laid off – one has been reassigned to other duties, one plans to retire and a third had recently vacated their post.
Total savings from the staff cuts are estimated at $450,000 per year.
