Montreal Gazette

Union’s letter to Barrette slams $120M in budget cuts at MUHC

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The union representi­ng nursing staff at the McGill University Health Centre has sent an urgent letter to Health Minister Gaétan Barrette condemning $120 million in budget cuts to the MUHC over the past five years.

The 3,000-member Union of Nursing and Cardio-Respirator­y Profession­als of the MUHC also charges in the letter to Barrette that patients are no longer receiving the care they deserve.

The union’s letter comes on the heels of two other letters sent to Barrette, one by the MUHC’s board of directors and another by a group of prominent physicians.

Barrette has yet to respond to the board of directors.

“We’re very greatly concerned,” Denyse Joseph, president of the union, said Wednesday.

“We’re trying to give the best care to patients, but because of the cuts, we can’t give them that care. There’s been a major increase in sick leaves among our members and most are related to mental health issues.”

Among the points raised in the letter:

The number of beds at the MUHC today stands at 710, down from 832 a few years ago.

The MUHC is being funded based on a 10-year-old clinical plan that hasn’t taken into account an increase in clinical volumes for cardiology and cancer patients, as well as the complexity of cases as Quebec’s population ages.

About 200 profession­al positions to deliver care to patients that were vacant and needed to be filled will be abolished.

The wait times in the emergency rooms have gone up and 1,000 elective surgeries have either been cancelled or postponed.

Many of the points in the letter have already been raised by MUHC officials to the health ministry. However, a spokespers­on for the hospital network, Vanessa Dahma, said in an email that “the MUHC won’t be commenting on this.”

Julie White, Barrette’s press attaché, declined as well to comment on the substance of the union’s letter, saying: “As we have already discussed, the MUHC is funded according to the same parameters as other hospitals in Quebec.”

The Gazette has learned that Barrette met before Easter with two high-ranking physicians of the MUHC, but the minister gave no indication the government would boost the budget of the five-hospital network. The MUHC’s annual budget today is about $850 million, down from more than $1 billion less than a decade ago.

The two MUHC physicians, Olivier Court, head of the council of physicians, dentists and pharmacist­s, and Gerald Fried, surgeon-in-chief, left the meeting with Barrette dejected and concerned, said a source who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to communicat­e with the media.

Barrette has denounced MUHC management in public on several occasions, most recently in a radio interview last month in which he said “there is a problem in terms of leadership at the MUHC.”

Meanwhile, the patient-rights committee has urged the government to reinvest in the MUHC in the same manner that it bailed out the struggling aerospace division of Bombardier.

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