INSIDE THE STORY OF HOSPITAL SPENDING

Hospitals are the single biggest cost in Alberta’s healthcare system, but it’s proved difficult to control ballooning expenses.

Postmedia health reporter Keith Gerein wanted to see how individual hospitals tackled the problem. First he had to get the numbers — data that is not publicly available any more in Alberta.

To get the data, Postmedia filed several freedom of information requests to obtain yearly budget and spending figures for each of 86 hospitals operated by Alberta Health Services, and whether those hospitals posted a surplus or deficit.

The information was then entered into a database and analyzed for various trends.

The hospital spending added up to about $26.4 billion over the last eight years, or $3.3 billion annually on average. This represents only a segment of total provincial spending on hospitals.

It is the portion under the control of local hospital managers, which typically includes basic medical and surgical teams, housekeeping, food services, utilities and some general maintenance funding.

It does not include amortization costs, nor programs that are offered in hospitals but paid for through a more centrally controlled budget stream. For example, funding for a vaccination clinic that operates within a hospital would be reported as part of AHS’s public health spending.

AHS says its budgeting and financial reporting practices are frequently tweaked, which can complicate year-to-year comparisons. As well, results that show up on paper as surpluses or deficits are occasionally misleading, since they may exclude funding tallied under a different part of the system, the health authority says.

Calgary’s South Health Campus hospital, opened in 2012, has been excluded from Postmedia’s analysis because that facility was initially funded under a different model and posted abnormally large surpluses for several years.

Postmedia also attempted to acquire financial results from Covenant Health, the Catholic agency that operates eight hospitals in Alberta including Edmonton’s Grey Nuns and Misericordia.

Covenant’s freedom of information office was able to provide budgets for the hospitals, but said it was impractical to calculate spending figures for each site due to the way the agency manages its finances.