While she purposely didn’t take up a lot of time at last weekend’s Rainy River District Municipal Association (RRDMA) meeting, Northwestern Health Unit (NWHU) CEO Marilyn Herbacz nevertheless delivered an important presentation wrapping up the chaos of 2020 from a financial standpoint for a very busy health unit.
Speaking to the assembled attendees via videoconferencing for the all-online RRDMA annual general meeting on Saturday, Herbacz noted that both she and Dr. Kit Young Hoon, the NWHU’s medical officer of health, felt those in attendance would rather hear about their COVID efforts, but they still thought it important to talk at least briefly about the previous year and a general overview of the budget heading into 2021.
Herbacz began the presentation with a breakdown of the health unit’s funding for 2020, showing five streams of funding the NWHU receives as well as how they balanced out for that calendar year.
“The breakdown is our ministry of health, our municipalities, the ministry of children, community and social services, we have some federal funding as well as ‘other,'” she said.
“‘Other’ includes things like small grants that our individual programs apply to and get accepted.”
According to Herbacz, in 2020 the Ministry of Health made up 71.2 per cent of the health unit’s funding overall, which included cost-shares, 100 percent programs and one-time payments. Money provided by the municipalities in the catchment area made up 11.8 percent, and the ministry of children, communities and social services provided 12.38 percent.
Going further, the federal government provided 1.08 percent, and the remaining ‘other’ funding made up the last 3.54 percent.
Herbacz noted that the 2020 calendar year started off strong, but like every other business and organization in the country ran into some problems come March.
“As you can imagine in 2020 we were starting off the year fully operational,” she explained.
“Our programs were fully functional. In March we shifted to COVID response as an entire organization. During that time we shifted 100 per cent of our staff ended up working on COVID in some form or another. That included redeploying staff to our hotline, to doing contact tracing, to working with our partner businesses and our schools to make sure they had all of the support that they needed to drive their business processes.”
Additionally, even as the COVID pandemic was in full swing, the NWHU was able to keep their clinics open and continue with their essential programming. At one point the NWHU was also delivering PPE across the region, though Herbacz noted they have since stopped running that program.
Herbacz shared that as the health unit moves into 2021 and continues to deal with the ongoing pandemic, the organization expects to start the year with a small surplus, due to a directive from the province to utilize their base funding to support COVID expenditures they needed to make. Also, it’s important to note that the health unit typically doesn’t get its new budget approved until “either later in the summer or in the fall,” according to Herbacz.
“We’ve even had our budgets approved in November a couple of times,” she said.
Because of this timing, Herbacz said the health unit generally operates on the approved budget from the year before.
“What this means is if we do get any new funding there’s usually not enough time to spend it, so we’re sending that money back,” she explained.
“Or at least a portion, because the ministry operates on a cash basis and we don’t get to keep their money in our reserve account. We do settlement every single year.”
To compensate for this, there is usually a ministry meeting in which the government “gives us a little hint and direction on where their approvals will land,” Herbacz said, though no such meeting was held this year, which has lead health units across the province to go forward with very little increases in funding.
For the NWHU, this year they will be looking at adding an additional position for a public health inspector, if the funding is approved, due to increased pressures and demands on inspectors across the region. The NWHU is asking for an increase of $85,000 increase to cover the new inspector, which bring their budget up to $15,450,00 for 2021. The total budget number, however, doesn’t include requests for one-time funding, which are made each year and sometimes influence funding decisions down the road.
“In our experience, sometimes if we continually ask for the same one-time funding, they at some point will move that up into our base funding,” Herbacz noted.
Other funding requests the NWHU will make in 2021 include an increase for the needle exchange program due to an increased demand across the region, an increase for the senior dental program which has been impacted by COVID and infrastructure costs, and new vaccine refrigerators or freezers, which they request annually but will also help accommodate the new COVID vaccines, including the Pfizer vaccine, which needs to be stored at -70 C (-94 F).
The NWHU had nothing to report on the issue of public health modernization as the COVID pandemic has taken priority, but Herbacz expects that once the pandemic has been brought under control the issue will be revisited.
