Jason Unrau
Northern News Services
Friday, March 23, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - Recruiting doctors, dealing with Nunavut patient billing issues and forced growth all added up to a $2.7 million operating deficit at Stanton Territorial Hospital last year, says NWT's health minister.

Minister for Health and Social Services Floyd Roland said that after next year that figure could hit $6 million.

Despite operating in the red, Roland said the good news is the hospital has a full complement of doctors and because of this, more surgeries were performed last year, increasing the hospital's overall operating expenses.

"I don't think any finance minister would say there's such thing as a good-news deficit but there are costs which are legitimate," Roland said, adding that the Financial Management Board Secretariat was reviewing costs in all departments.

Last week in the legislative assembly, Kam Lake MLA Dave Ramsay questioned Roland about the hospital deficit and whether more funding could be provided for the hospital.

"Why does it happen this way as opposed to working with the Standing Committee on Social Programs to take a look at areas that you could do better or more?" Ramsay asked.

"Is it common practice to go through a supplementary appropriation exercise to knock off a deficit in one of our operations?"

In addition to $2.9 million to cover half of the projected $6 million hospital deficit for the next fiscal year, there were $7 million in additional funds itemized in the GNWT's 2007 supplementary appropriation bill to address financial shortfalls in health care delivery across the NWT.

According to Roland, this process was "established quite some years ago when the idea of surpluses could be kept with authorities."

Last year at Stanton, providing physician services knocked the hospital $1.9 million into the red, forced growth put the facility an additional $900,000 over budget and a shortfall in billing for Nunavut patients is outstanding to the tune of $400,000.

Nevertheless, Roland was not concerned the red ink was the beginning of a trend.

"Since 1997 Stanton has had five years where it's carried a surplus," he said, noting the 2004/2005 Stanton $500,000 surplus put towards last year's deficit. "Delays in billing, forced growth was due to more doctors performing more surgeries, it adds up... one individual can throw us off for a half-million dollars."