CancerCare’s budget savings not a cut: Goertzen
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2017 (2975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen refuses to categorize the $2.5 million in budget savings the province demanded of CancerCare Manitoba as a cut.
“We’ve increased the budget for CancerCare by almost $5 million, year over year,” Goertzen said Tuesday after the issue was raised in the legislature.
“We know the need (for cancer treatment) is great. But we’ve asked every part of the health care system to look for efficiencies because where they can find efficiencies, that money can go back into care,” he said.
The Free Press reported over the weekend — and in Tuesday’s print edition — CancerCare had been directed earlier this year to find the savings.
The Health Department informed the agency of its demand just a week after the government axed plans for a $300-million CancerCare building project. CancerCare responded by cutting back on interprovincial staff travel and limiting its involvement with professional associations. It also ceased filling staff vacancies and cut senior management positions by 15 per cent — as was required of regional health authorities and Crown corporations.
“We need to find efficiencies throughout the entire health-care system because when those efficiencies are found they can be reinvested into patient care,” Goertzen said Tuesday.
The $5 million in new money this year went mainly to drug and treatment costs, he said.
Meanwhile, he said CancerCare’s long-planned building expansion project is not entirely dead.
“I’ve had ongoing discussions with CancerCare and certainly what I’ve asked them to do is to look at a proposal that is less than $300 million,” he said. “When money is going into bricks and mortar that is money that can’t go to care.”
In 2011, CancerCare said it was so short of space that it was converting washrooms into offices and cannibalizing meeting rooms to conduct pediatric clinical trials. It hoped a new, expanded facility would allow it to retain and attract the brightest specialists and researchers.
“We’ve asked them to look at different (building) models,” Goertzen said.
“They committed to doing that and we expect that that work is underway.”
larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca