It’s been a while since our last installment of Q & As and we want to thank everyone for their patience. We continue to receive many thoughtful and detailed questions and suggestions, and we remain as committed as ever to the process — we gladly accept the challenge!

Today, we’re pleased to publish three more Q & As on a mix of topics.

If you have a question, we’re listening and we encourage you to email us what’s on your mind.

Today’s answered questions

 Q. One of VCH’s True North Goals is: Developing the Best Workforce. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the implications of the latest revision to the Excluded Employees’ Contract Terms, as well as the current salary freeze, as it pertains to that goal.

While it was not mentioned in the “Highlights of Changes Document”, a comparison of the new contract with the previous one indicates that there were also some revisions made to the section on compensation. Our current contract mentions annual opportunities for increases in salary, tied to performance, which was noticeably absent from this new contract. These increases in salary help to ensure equity with the labor market, reward exceptional service and increasing responsibilities for staff, and offer a path to financial progression throughout one’s career. Furthermore, with increased contribution expectations to our pensions (without a corresponding increase in the benefit calculation), and salary freezes for sections of excluded staff in place, some staff will be experiencing lower take home pay (0.7 % decrease) despite rising costs of living and inflation. How can we develop, and more importantly, retain the best workforce if staff who are excelling in their roles are not given opportunities to progress financially? How does our organization expect to compete with other employers who offer these fairly standard incentives?

I recognize that a large part of the answer to this question is restrictions that are placed on VCH by the current salary freeze. While the salary freeze is beyond the control of our HA, what actions are VCH and other Health Authorities taking to ensure that we don’t lose our best staff to other organizations with better opportunities for compensation, or that we don’t have staff shuffling between Health Authorities so that they can obtain otherwise standard wage increases?

A. Your question touches on an important topic: What attracts people to one organization over another? And, how can we retain talented staff?

Consistent with our True North goals, we’re committed to creating a workplace where staff and physicians can do their best every day. For many people, this is a driving factor in their job choice. Research and personal experience also tell us that an individual’s choice to join, or stay, with an organization is influenced by a variety of factors beyond compensation, including (and in no particular order):

• development and career growth opportunities
• organizational culture and staff engagement
• the team they work with
• the nature of the work and the working conditions
• benefits package

All of these factors — including compensation — are significant to us as we strive to develop the best workforce.

Regarding the salary freeze, it has been lifted for some excluded staff and VCH continues to advocate for lifting the freeze for those still affected.

 Q. Sometimes a department makes a change in order to realize a savings to their budget. However, this change causes another department to have an increase in their budget. This increase can potentially meet or exceed the savings of the original department. In essence, the “savings” is either neutral or an increase to the overall budget of the hospital.

The original department can be applauded for seeing a potential savings within their budget. However, they have only their budget in eye; not the entire hospital’s budget. Also, a department cannot know all the repercussions and/or chain reactions caused by a change that reverberates through the system.

Who overlooks the idea to see whether it is truly a savings to the hospital overall? Who, within the financial hierarchy, has an eye out for such things? Who can see whether a “savings” is actually an increase to the overall hospital budget and not a savings at all?

How can we, as staff, ensure that an idea goes through the proper analysis and scrutiny to know whether it is a viable idea or not?

A. Your question highlights the importance of our working together, as One Vancouver. As you point out, we are organized into numerous departments/programs, each with its own budget, but we need to function as one across the entire continuum of care.

Protecting patient/client safety is our top priority, which is why we look at all potential cost savings from a number of angles. Our aim is to determine whether there are “downstream” implications within a department, across departments/programs and across sites. We do this in a number of ways.

Program managers meet with their directors regularly meet to review their programs and budgets, and discuss new or developing issues. Should changes in one department impact another, managers can raise the issue with their director. Then, every other week, Vancouver’s entire senior leadership team —Acute and Community directors —meet to discuss patient care and services, operational issues and budgets. Together, as One Vancouver, we focus on how we can continue enhancing patient care, outcomes and quality indicators within budget. Each meeting includes a detailed review of our Vancouver budget and illuminates issues with significant impact on our expenses.

Adjusting budgets is never easy and we don’t make decisions lightly — but we aren’t perfect. Sometimes decisions lead to unintended consequences. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen frequently and, when it does, the issue generally comes to our attention through our regular and rigorous reviews.

Having said this, if you have a concern that you believe we should be aware of, we encourage you to speak with your manager or contact us at onevancouver@vch.ca.

Q. Why don’t we switch to online pay advices? We could save money on loads of envelopes, paper and ink, plus valuable time of stuffing envelope.

A. We agree! You’ll be pleased to know that work is already underway to enable us to switch to electronic pay statements. As you may know, the Staff Email Project began earlier this year. The purpose of this project is to ensure all VCH employees have VCH email addresses — a much larger undertaking than it may sound. By the end of this year we expect to have all current addresses validated. Our next step is to provide email addresses and network IDs for all VCH staff who currently don’t have them. Once this work is complete, we’ll be in a position to begin the work of transitioning to electronic pay statements — and start reaping the savings benefits.