Powell River Regional Hospital District’s chair has had productive discussions with Vancouver Coastal Health officials.
In the chair’s report at the December 20 hospital board meeting, hospital district chair George Doubt said on December 11, he had a meeting with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) to talk about capital planning for VCH for the year. He said there are hundreds of millions of dollars required from the various health authorities from across the province, and that there is a difference between those requests and what the provincial government is prepared to fund. There are about $65 million in local requests from Vancouver Coastal Health and only $55 million or less available to fund them, according to Doubt.
He said VCH discussed the cycle of its funding, where they make applications around this time of year to the provincial government, resulting in requests to the regional hospital district later in its budgeting process. According to Doubt, the commitment from VCH is to come back with earlier requests for hospital districts. Doubt said VCH is prepared to have discussions about capital funding requests for the hospital district in June, rather than the late fall.
“It would be well ahead of our budget process,” said Doubt. “It was a good meeting. It was a different tone than we’ve had at other meetings.
“I look forward to improvement. The fact is that health care needs way more funding than it has and dividing the available funding among the people who need it is going to be difficult.”
Powell River Regional Hospital District has received more than $3 million in cost share requests from VCH since the 2020-2021 budget. There has been a recommendation that the hospital board direct staff to fund the balance of the VCH cost share requests that have not been converted to long-term debt from hospital district reserve funds.
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