The Wellington Health Care Alliance provided an update to Wellington North council that included a successful recruitment efforts but also a financial deficit.
The Alliance includes North Wellington Health Care and Groves Memorial Community Hospital.
NWHC’s two hospital sites in Mount Forest and Palmerston ran a deficit of about $125,000 but after amortization and depreciation the figure was closer to $335,000.
“We are projecting a deficit for this fiscal of $1.7 million,” Angela Stanley, president and CEO of the Alliance told council Monday. “We received our funding letters for this fiscal year approximately three weeks ago so we’re unpacking all of that and we’ll work with our partners at the ministry and Ontario Health to navigate that as we go forward.”
Stanley reported that emergency room visits at NWHC’s sites in Mount Forest and Palmerston saw approximately 24,700 visits over the last fiscal year.
“We’ve seen a stabilization in our post pandemic volumes, but patients are coming in sicker,” explained Stanley. “So while we’re seeing what we saw prior to the pandemic, the patients that are coming into the emergency department are sicker, for a variety of reasons – our population has aged, access to primary care. There’s a number of reasons for that but it does cause increased workload within the organization.”
Emergency room closures are down as well.
“We peaked last summer with five and then so far this fiscal we are at one closure,” explained Stanley.
Since the summer of 2023 they have been able to hire 10 registered nurses – five are recent graduates. The addition of those nurses saw vacant nursing shifts drop from over 250 last summer to 96 this summer.
Stanley explained in a small, rural hospital it can take 18-24 months to train a new nurse before they feel confident to work along in the emergency department.
One of the newest recruits to the team is a therapy dog named Scout.
“This was a request of our staff to pet therapy come in so they can just decompress and play with an animal so that’s a really great initiative,” said Stanley