Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I was going to start by saying thank you for the opportunity to talk about some daunting challenges, but when you said speak slowly and do it in five minutes, that just replaced the first challenge. However, I'd like to also talk about some exciting opportunities.
Health care is very rapidly creeping up to a $200 billion industry in this country, and by all analysis, it's an unsustainable industry. That is not only in Canada but throughout the developed world, and totally regardless of who is paying for it. Whether it's private or public or mixed or mutuals, as in Europe, no one can afford to pay the price we are paying for health care now.
St. Boniface Hospital wishes to propose to contribute to trying to help in this phenomenon.
There are really two pieces to this equation. One is, obviously, when there's not enough money, you can either grow the income or reduce the expenses. We have some ideas on both of those.
On the first, in terms of growing income, we think we should be investing more in supporting research in Canada. St. Boniface Hospital was the first stand-alone basic research centre in a hospital in the country. We've had some successes, and some companies have grown quite nicely, thank you. I think of Intelligent Hospital Systems with, the last time I looked, 80 employees in Manitoba. It just didn't exist a few years ago.
However, we still aren't capable of supporting our researchers with our advice and our expertise as much as they need. Everyone wants to support the home-run hitter that everyone knows is a home-run hitter, but people find it very difficult to find the wherewithal to support the guys and girls who are going to hit the singles and doubles for us until they produce that home run.
The other thing that St. Boniface is proposing is to allow our infrastructure to be used in off hours and on weekends by fledgling small and medium-sized enterprises. It might not surprise you to learn that Canada produces 4.1% of the scientific papers in the world, but only 1.7% of the patents that come to fruition. We believe that more products will create more companies, more companies will create more jobs, and more jobs will create more wealth.
That's the plus side of the equation.
I will now speak in French.
On the other side, we need to reduce our health care spending, which is unsustainable. We feel that this is doable. It may seem somewhat contradictory, but it can be done through quality.
A few years ago, at St. Boniface Hospital, we proposed that there be a single strategic priority—quality—and that the way to do it was through the Lean quality transformation approach. We often use the Lean transformation to improve the process and efficiency. But, John Toussaint, who is one of the world's Lean experts in healthcare, said that wasn't the case, that it involves a radical culture change in the approach toward treating patients.
I will say very quickly that we have four main strategic directions: satisfy patients, engage staff, decrease injury to patients, so harm them less, and manage resources.
In four years, the results show that our patients have never been more satisfied. We have hit peaks of client satisfaction twice in the year. Up to 87% of our patients have said that the care they received was very good, or excellent, and not just satisfactory. Our employees have also never been as engaged. In five years, we have had an increase in involvement of 34%.
Our mortality rate at the hospital has decreased by 30% in the past three years. Our goal was to have it drop by 10%. Our financial performance has improved in the past two years, and we have managed to reach our goal, which was 1% year over year. So, over two years, with 1% of our budget of about $300 million, we managed to increase service delivery by $3 million. Last year, it was $6.2 million, and our objective for this year is $9 million.
In short, I am asking you to stop and think. If we were to take the $200 billion spent on healthcare in Canada and applied 1% improvement over five years, year over year, that would be a cumulative total of $30 billion in improvement to financial performance.
If the St. Boniface Hospital managed to help Canadian society overall to reach 10% of that goal, and if the St. Boniface Hospital's contribution was 1% of $3 billion, that would equal $30 million. We recommend that a centre of expertise and learning in these techniques be established so that we can help other institutions in Canada progress in this direction, in order to have patients who are more satisfied and employees who are more engaged, and to gain better clinical results.
Thank you, Madam Chair.