Hospital spending requires ‘gentle pressure’

Press, 16 July 1987, Page 2

Hospital spending requires ‘gentle pressure’

“Gentle corrective pressure” would have to be applied to spending if the Canterbury Hospital Board was to stay within budget this year, the board’s finance committee was told yesterday. The director of finance, Mr David Herman, said that the board was already $476,802 over budget in its maintenance account only three months into the financial year. “The area of concern is salaries and wages which is $649,928 over budget — a significant portion of this is for registered medical officers (R.M.0.5),” he said. If the trend continued, the board could have overspent between $1 million and $3 million in salaries and wages by the end of the financial year, said Mr Herman. “By and large, we will have to start looking at gentle corrective pressure over the next three months.” Part of the problem was that the board was underfunded for R.M.O.s by $1.5 million on the present staffing numbers

and rosters, he said. But before the board could receive its full allocation, hospital boards that were over-funded had to give money back, said Mr Herman. The chairman of the committee, Mr David Lawrence, said the overexpenditure was a “most unsatisfactory trend.” “Some measures have to be put in place to control our over-spending rather than to make further application for an increase in funds,” he said. However, Mrs June Gardiner questioned the inequitable distribution of funds. “According to the system we are under-funded but when we ask about it, they (the Health Department) just ‘So what’ and ‘Get on with the job.’ “Some other board has this money at the expense of the Canterbury board. We had to cut down our expenditure last year and the year before and the year before, and we have done it.” Mrs Gardiner said that the board should send a letter to the Health De-

partment pointing out that the board was underfunded and asking what was going to be done about it. “I could not support the view that this board has to cut services to pay for this.” Professor Don Beaven, Said that the department needed a new knife to cut the financial cake more equitably. “We cannot live in Alice in Wonderland in 1987. It is illogical if we can identify that we are under-funded and the department has some other crazy formula by which it allocates money.” One way of partially solving the problem of over-expenditure could be by closing some hospital wards during the Christmas period when the hospitals had fewer patients, said Professor Beaven. The board could also defer hiring R.M.O.S from overseas, usually hired in December, until January or February, he said. The committee decided to recommend that the board write to the Health Department about being under-funded for R.M.O.S.