Getting a handle on health-care absenteeism

Saskatchewan auditor Judy Ferguson released the second volume of her annual report this week. Thia James spoke to Ferguson about why she focused her review on Heartland, the health authority with the seventh highest rate of absenteeism.

Q Why narrow the focus with regards to absenteeism in health care to Heartland?

A The reason why we focused on health care, first off, is that Stats Canada indicates the health sector and the social assistance sector have higher rates of absenteeism. So we wanted to look at a sector that has a higher rate of absenteeism. For Heartland ... we like to move across to different health authorities. We haven’t been to Heartland in a period of time on a functional area — which is what human resources is. Secondly, they were also middle of the pack and we thought if we pick somebody that was more middle of the pack, we might get a more fair look at what was going on.

Q Can the findings about Heartland be extrapolated and applied broadly? A We don’t tend to extrapolate our findings but we do know that we did get statistics that actually Heartland had and other health authorities had. That’s why we know they were the middle of the pack. Last year, in 2016-2017, it ranged from a high of 11.7 days (of sick leave) per year to a low of 8.5 days per year. Heartland was sitting at 10.5. So we do know there are other health authorities that got higher amounts of sick leave.

Q Health was one of the several ministries where you say there’s a need to remove unnecessary user access to information. Do your findings lead to concerns about the security of the public’s data?

A What we have found is that there is improvement at organizations in removing it more promptly. We’ve asked organization to see if there have been breaches with respect to not removing promptly, and to date they’ve gotten lucky in that there hasn’t been. In saying that, though, we think it’s still equally important they remove it promptly to reduce the risk of that occurring.