Health windfall expected

By Dan Hilborn
Published Sept. 18, 2004


The Fraser Health Authority is looking forward to receiving more than a billion new dollars over the next six years, after Prime Minister Paul Martin and the 10 provincial premiers reached agreement on a new health-care accord on Wednesday night.

The deal, which will inject $18 billion into the system nationwide over six years, includes an escalator clause that could provide more than $41 billion over the next decade and should allow the local health authority to improve its delivery of services and standards of care, said Fraser Health CEO Bob Smith.

"There's no doubt in my mind that this is an extremely positive decade for the people that Fraser Health serves," Smith said Thursday morning, as details of the plan were being made public.

"We have every expectation that we will be able to serve them in a much more timely and effective way."

While the exact funding amounts have not been worked out, Smith noted that Fraser Health should get about one-third of B.C.'s total $5 billion share of the new funding, based on the fact that the region represents about one-third of the population of the province.

Smith also cautioned that new money alone is not the only fix needed in the Canadian medical system.

"Is it a solution?" he asked.

"We need to remember that people taking personal responsibility for their own health is the single greatest solution. We shouldn't just think that now that governments have made these kinds of decisions that we can holus-bolus forget our personal responsibility."

He also noted that the health authority will continue to look for new and different ways of providing health services.

"What's very important in a system such as ours is the ability to provide choices," he said.

"I think that you will find health authorities very interested in where they can purchase health services for their population.

"We'll look to a new balance. Health authorities will either provide those services in their own facilities or by purchasing them from other care deliverers, who are generally referred to as the private sector."

Smith also said that he hopes to see substantial increases in the amount of education offered by the government as a means of bring more professionals and skilled workers into the field.

"We have shortages in many of the technological and technology sectors - biomedical information technicians, respiratory technologists and licensed practical nurses. We're quite challenged by the range of available health professionals and that will take us some time to build."

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell praised the deal as a step towards fixing the problems in the health care system.

"It provides us with sustainable funding we can count on," Campbell said at the press conference announcing the new funding.

"When we can count on it, our patients can count on improvements across the country."

But B.C. NDP leader Carole James asked for assurances that the new funding would be spent on patient services and not be used to pay private health-care providers.