With the Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge district health unit (HKPR) last week announcing that it plans to merge with Peterborough Public Health (PPH) effective Jan. 1, 2025, one has to wonder what kind of impact this is going to have on people looking to access public health programming and services moving forward.
Generally speaking, whenever you hear someone talking about a merger – a dirty word – or a consolidation – an even dirtier one, especially here in the County – the loose translation is there’s probably going to be some kind of service reduction, hidden among buzzwords like ‘efficiency’ and ‘streamlining’, to go along with cost savings.
According to Cec Ryall, the County’s sitting member on the HKPR board, the opposite is true for this partnership. He said the merger is moving ahead to stop what has been a constant flow of program cuts over the past two years, while ensuring the new conjoined entity receives more money than the two units would have gotten separately.
It checks out – last month Dr. Natalie Bocking, HKPR medical officer of health, said the unit is projecting to finish the 2024/25 fiscal year on March 31 with a $188,467 budget shortfall. She said funding increases from the Ministry of Health, capped at one per cent for the next three years, are not enough to maintain current service levels.
HKPR is using cash reserves to balance its budget.
The health unit has had to scale back in areas like nutrition, student and school health, and the public vaccine and preventable diseases program. Since 2022, HKPR has effectively eliminated six full-time positions – Bocking referred to the practice as gapping, leaving approved and needed positions vacant to balance the books.
Our health unit has been bleeding for some time – Ryall said, without a merger, he feared for the corporation’s future.
When you look at inflation over the past few years – the country’s Consumer Price Index rose 6.8 per cent in 2022, 3.9 per cent in 2023, and projected to be 2.9 per cent come the end of 2024, so up 13.6 per cent – and consider that new contracts with unionized staff are driving costs up about three per cent annually there, it’s easy to see why. Especially with the Ministry of Health sticking to such paltry annual funding increases.
So, with very little new money coming in, but an approximate 15 to 20 per cent increase to the health unit’s bottom line, something had to give. Bocking said without the merger, or a massive increase in municipal tax contributions, more cuts in future years were a certainty.
It’s impossible to say at this point whether merging will prove to be the life-saving surgery both HKPR and PPH needs. We know little about how they plan to bring departments together. We don’t yet know who will lead this new corporation. We don’t even know what it’s going to be called.
What we do know is the province is investing a little over $10.1 million to make this happen. The Ministry of Health has committed to covering 100 per cent of all merger-related costs. Bocking said there should be money left over to help with immediate capital improvements and program stabilization.
Looking big picture, Ryall hopes the merger provides County residents with better access to care and services. Seeing no way past crippling budget limitations operating solely under the HKPR banner, the Highlands East deputy mayor is prepared to take a leap of faith.
To me, it seems the Ontario government’s continued underfunding has pushed Ryall, the rest of the HKPR board, and colleagues at PPH into the unknown. Really, they have no choice but to hope for the best, because what they were doing couldn’t go on for much longer.
Here’s hoping this merger proves to be the exception – meaning improvements – rather than the usual rule of cut, cut, cut.
