President’s Blog: My Personal Business Commitments

By Rik Ganderton - President & CEO

My Personal Business Commitments (PBCs) are available here.

I am sharing my PBCs as part of my accountability to the organization. These are the major things that we as an organization have set for ourselves to do this year. They have been developed directly from the Strategic Plan on-a-Page, which set our strategic direction and is posted on our public website and internal Intranet.


As a reminder, you'll recall we've said we intend "to be the best at what we do" and that:
- We will work as a team;
- Live our values every day;
- Relentlessly focus on quality in a health workplace;
- Maintain and strengthen core services and enhance centres of excellence;
- Deliver services within the context of the Central East Local Health Integration Network, Integrated Health Service Plan and Clinical Services Plan; and
- Live within our resources.

My Personal Business Commitments have been approved by our Board of Directors. By sharing these PBCs, we at Rouge Valley are cutting a new path that you are all a big part of.

Open communications has been a key of that path since I had the pleasure of joining the Rouge team in 2007.

I’m publishing my PBCs to help provide greater clarity for us all and to help each of us understand how our varied roles contribute to achieving our strategy at Rouge Valley. By focusing on achievement of these goals we will ensure that the day to day "noise," that we all face, will not distract us from our major objectives.

I want our vice-presidents, chiefs and all physicians, directors, managers and all staff and volunteers to see the very tangible targets the Board and I have set for me and for Rouge Valley itself.

PBCs have also been set by our senior team and are being cascaded throughout the leadership organization so that we are all aligned on our goals. The management team will be sharing their PBCs with their teams. The senior team has shared their individual goals with each other so that there is clarity and understanding between us.

By publishing my PBCs, and later those of our entire management team, all staff and physicians with be better able to work toward our common vision to be the best acute care community hospital.

We will continue to work as a team, at every level of Rouge Valley, to provide the best health care experience for our patients and their families.

PBCs are the tool we will use to provide clarity to the direction we have set our selves and how we will achieve and measure our success on that journey. They also make the links across management and staff, physicians, departments, campuses and disciplines.

The development of PBC's will become and annual exercise for the whole management team so that we have clear alignment of our actions to achieve our strategic intent of being "the best at what we do."

Please feel free to email me (rganderton@rougevalley.ca) any questions or thoughts you have about my PBCs.

Implementing our plan

By Rik Ganderton
President & CEO

As many of you will now be aware, OPSEU has decided to withdraw its motion for an injunction that was to be heard in Court on Friday May 16th. An application for judicial review of the process used by the CELHIN will now be heard by the Court on July 11th.

RVHS is now in a position to start implementing the Deficit Elimination Plan that was approved by our Board on March 25th. The plan is the foundation for the Hospital Services Accountability Agreement (H-SAA) that we signed with the Central East LHIN in early April.

This afternoon we provided formal notification to our various Unions regarding the restructuring. This will mean the provisions of the various collective agreements will kick in and we will start to deal with Early Retirement and Voluntary Exit Packages and subsequent (and hopefully minimal) individual notices of layoffs.

This has been a very difficult time for all our staff. We all know that we had to take these difficult but important actions. We have all been frustrated by the implementation delays forced on us over the last six weeks or so. However, we will now start implementation and the transformation of RVHS into a higher performing hospital; a hospital that we can be proud to work for, that provides the core services our communities need in a caring and efficient way and relentlessly focuses on delivering the highest quality of care.

Thank you all for your patience during this very difficult period. We have lots of work to do as we continue to develop detailed implementation plans and make the needed changes. I look forward to working with you all as we transform RVHS to be the best at what we do.

Injunction

By Rik Ganderton
President and CEO

OPSEU has brought a court application seeking a Judicial Review of the Central East LHIN's process in approving the RVHS Deficit Elimination Plan, which includes the consolidation of mental health beds at Centenary. OPSEU has also served RVHS with a Notice of Motion seeking an injunction restraining it from implementing the mental health bed consolidation until the application is determined by the Court. In these circumstances, our legal counsel has advised that:

1. We should not discuss this matter publicly, while it is before the courts; and

2. We should not commence implementation until the legal matter is resolved.

We will keep you posted as to updates on this matter.

The facts on our improved Mental Health model

By Rik Ganderton
President and CEO

Our improved model for mental health care at Rouge Valley Health System has received much media coverage.
But lost or buried is the fact that the new model will improve mental health care by –
• Increasing expert mental health crisis intervention services from 12 hours (8 on weekends) to 16 hours a day, seven days a week at the Ajax and Pickering Campus.
• Maintaining our outpatient services at Ajax and Pickering Campus. Outpatient Mental Health Care serves the vast majority of mental health patients
• Continuing access to all mental health services, including emergencies, through our Ajax and Pickering Campus
• Consolidating specialized Mental Health Nursing expertise for inpatient care so that more hours of nursing care will be provided to those patients who require treatment on an in-patient basis.
• Adding a further eight beds to General Medicine at the Ajax and Pickering Campus to improve patient flow and reduce wait times in our Emergency Department.
We are also exploring alternate patient care uses for the space that will be vacated in the Ajax and Pickering Campus. Among the alternate uses is the possible addition of more medical beds at our Ajax and Pickering Campus to further reduce Emergency Department Wait Times. These would require additional funding which we are discussing with the LHIN.

THE NEXT THREE YEARS
Furthermore, there has also been a considerable amount of misrepresentation by some parties as to the number and nature of jobs we must eliminate over the next three years. The facts are –
• 220 positions will go over three years: 60 at the Ajax and Pickering Campus; and 160 at the Centenary Campus.
• Of the 60 jobs at Ajax and Pickering Campus, 36 are Mental Health staff who will be re-employed at Centenary Campus; in other words they are not losing their jobs.
• Of the total positions being eliminated over the next 3 years, 72 are nursing. However, the nurses currently filling those positions will have the opportunity to move into newly funded positions such as those required for the expansion of the specialized Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (14) and the Ajax and Pickering Campus (60) as well as the other options described below.
It is our strongly held belief that almost no person will have to leave RVHS involuntarily. Our normal staff turnover rate is about five per cent a year, which represents 150 positions a year. In addition we will –
• Fill vacancies in areas not being restructured.
• Provide early retirement and voluntary exit packages in accordance with our collective agreements, which cover more than 90% of our staff.
• Provide retraining to support redeployment.
• Fill new positions created by our expansion projects.
Our three-year plan represents changes for the better. Rouge Valley will be a top performer in the healthcare system. We will deploy staff at similar levels to our best performing peers. We will improve the quality of care we deliver and reduce wait times in our Emergency Departments. We will live within the money provided to us.
We know we can do this because we have compared ourselves against other Ontario hospitals. We have seen how they treat patients more quickly, with better service quality and lower resource use than Rouge Valley. As we do this we will continue to grow our services in conjunction with the directions of the Central East Local Health Integration Network.