When the Central East Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) asked the Scarborough and Rouge Valley hospitals to work together to plan hospital services in the eastern most part of Toronto, few would have thought the CEOs would come back talking merger instead.
Given the impetus for the talks was The Scarborough Hospital’s difficult financial situation, a merger could be a costly and risky response. Robert Biron, new CEO of The Scarborough Hospital, said no final decision will be made until residents, staff and doctors are first consulted.
“Almost all studies suggest that hospital consolidations raise costs of care by at least two per cent and, in the U.S., sometimes significantly more,” states retired consultant Thomas Weil in a 2010 edition of the Journal of Health Services Research and Policy.
A 2012 UK report on hospital mergers in that country also concluded the “financial performance declines, labour productivity does not change, waiting times for patients rise and there is no indication of an increase in clinical quality.”
It may be one of the reasons why we have seen so few of them in the second decade of the century after witnessing so many in the first. With funding already extremely tight, who would want to risk making the situation worse?
OPSEU Diablogue 