The province’s Primary Care Networks got some good news earlier this month as provincial Health Minister Sarah Hoffman cancelled a planned $75-million funding cut.
Instead, the government will review PCN finances and determine what kind of funding is needed. Twelve of the province’s 42 PCNs will be reviewed over the summer, although it is not yet clear which PCNs will be looked at.
Dena Pedersen, the executive director of the St. Albert and Sturgeon PCN, said while the proposed cut never came into effect and didn’t affect her budget, the July 6 announcement is good news for future planning, and added she hopes to be involved in the review process.
“We would love the opportunity to showcase the work we’re doing. Our staff and physicians are working really hard to meet the needs of the patients. It would be a wonderful opportunity to showcase what we do and how we do it.”
Under the previous provincial government, the funding cut was announced and primary care networks were told to make up the funding shortfall through their surpluses.
Pedersen said one of the issues is that PCNs, like the one in St. Albert and Sturgeon, had already made plans for that money.
“The surplus was originally earmarked to support additional services and programming at the patient-care level, as well as the potential to expand our clinical space,” she said.
Those plans were put on hold when the previous funding cuts were announced, and Pedersen said she hopes to have the opportunity to get them back on track.
One of the initiatives the PCN had funded last year is an after-hours program to encourage physicians to expand their clinical hours to open earlier and close later, which saw some very significant success while it was funded. There were 12,000 patients seen after hours in the 2014 fiscal year, and physicians took on 2,800 new patients.
“We had this in our last business plan, and now we’re just awaiting approval from the government for us to go ahead and re-establish that program,” she said.
Pedersen added there has been discussion about the PCN itself opening a general after-hours practice, but at this point the funding has been prioritized elsewhere – specifically, to raise awareness about the role PCNs play, to expand clinical space and to hire more staff.
There are 62 physicians who operate under the umbrella of the St. Albert and Sturgeon PCN, who are supported by 37 PCN staff – and 21 of those employees work out in the community and in physicians’ offices. These include pharmacists, primary care nurses, mental-health nurses, social workers and dietitians.
One of the most significant concerns about funding that PCNs have, Pedersen said, is that rather than being funded a straight per-capita basis for patients within the PCN, which would include anyone who sees any of those 62 physicians, it’s instead based on doctors’ billings over a three-year cycle.
This can tend to confound the numbers because many healthy adults go three years or more without seeing their physician so would not be counted in the funding model.
