Ontario residents are getting a first look at the contracts of hospital CEOs, revealing a wide range of benefits and retirement packages that include offers of luxury car leases, golf club memberships and even free plastic surgery.

Hospital websites posted the contracts for some of the top earners in charge of the province’s 150 hospitals on Tuesday, as part of a new Freedom of Information disclosure that came into effect on New Year’s Day.

Tom Closson, president and CEO of the Ontario Hospital Association, said the decision was made to release the contracts online by Tuesday “rather than waiting for requests to come in one at a time or hospital by hospital.”

While the salaries of hospital executives who earn more than $100,000 annually have been disclosed since 1996 via Ontario’s so-called “sunshine list,” it wasn’t until now that their full contract details have been made readily available.

The contracts provide a window into the world of high-powered health executives.

For example, Mary Jo Haddad, the head of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, makes $520,000 a year. If she gets fired, the hospital has to give her $25,000 worth of career counselling.

At Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, CEO Dr. Barry McLellan gets $18,000 a year for a vehicle.

While Ontario’s health-care system may be strapped for cash, Closson said some of the apparent special allowances for executives are necessary for them to do their jobs.

“The Sunnybrook CEO has a hospital that runs on multiple sites and uses a car at work, so there’s justification itself for a car allowance,” he said. Still, there are other CEO contract offers that may require some further explanation.

The original contract deal for Ruby Brown, the acting CEO of Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga, included offers of cosmetic surgery, fitness equipment and a free Jenny Craig weight-loss program plan.

Those bonuses are not contained in Brown’s latest contract due to the 2010 Ontario Broader Public Sector Accountability Act, which removed contentious perks from public-sector employee contracts.

Among the CEOs who have been offered generous contract packages are those running some of the Greater Toronto Area’s biggest hospitals. They include:

Ruby Brown, CEO

Read the full contract by clicking here.

Base salary: $310,000

Health and spending benefits: $5,000

Optional expenses: Laser eye surgery, cosmetic surgery and weight loss programs.

Dr. Barry McClellan, president and CEO

Read the full contract by clicking here.

Base salary: $550,000, bonus of up to 30 per cent of base salary.

Flexible benefit allowance: $25,000

Annual car allowance: $18,000

Mary Jo Haddad, president and CEO

Read the full contract by clicking here.

Base salary: $520,000, plus bonus of up to 30 per cent of base salary.

Outplacement assistance: Up to $25,000 to help employee move to another position after employment ends (assuming it’s without cause).

Murray Martin, CEO

Read the full contract by clicking here.

Base salary: $527,000

Monthly car allowance: $1,200

Health-care coverage post-retirement: $3,500 per year up until 2028. The amount can be collected as a lump sum.

Retirement compensation agreement: A series of annual payments ranging from $110,000 to $277,000. A hospital spokesman said this is to compensate for a pension Martin left when he transferred from a hospital in British Columbia.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/hospital-ceo-contracts-reveal-car-golf-perks-203112220.html

TORONTO – The doctor shortage of a few years ago is being resolved and Canada could be heading towards a glut of physicians, data in a new report on the supply of doctors suggest.
The number of practising doctors in Canada is at an all-time high, with nearly 70,000 active physicians working in the country last year. Out-migration of doctors has declined, licensing of international medical graduates has increased and medical schools are pumping out record numbers of new doctors, said the report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
“I think the actual story here is — boy, this was all so predictable and guess what? It’s all coming to pass,” said Dr. Morris Barer, a health policy analyst with the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Health Services and Policy.
“The die has been cast, our future has been set in stone, and now we watch. And I think the people who should be really worried are the funders and policy makers across the country — because the cost pressures are going to increase dramatically.”
Barer doesn’t think Canada currently has a glut, but he’s not sure the country had a shortage a few years ago either. He said there is no magic formula for figuring out what the right number of doctors is for a country.
“Too many factors need to be taken into account in thinking about that and I don’t think that there’s any science that could ever determine that for you,” he said.
“It’s partly a function of what you’re willing to pay for and what sorts of other personnel you’re prepared to train to provide certain parts of health care.”
But more doctors probably means the push to rationalize the delivery of care by devolving some tasks to other health-care personnel — nurse practitioners or physician assistants — may suffer, Barer suggested.
Health economist Arthur Sweetman doesn’t believe Canada has a glut of doctors yet either, but suggests it might be headed that way, with large medical school intakes still underway.
The problem isn’t just about how many doctors the country has, but where they are practising and what their specialty is, he said, suggesting the country may be training too many pediatricians and too few gerontologists, ophthalmologists and orthopedic surgeons to cope when baby boomers become senior citizens.
“We have the short-term glasses on right now. We need to maybe put the long-term glasses on,” said Sweetman, a member of CHEPA — the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis — at McMaster University in Hamilton.
“Are are we still going to need the really high numbers that we’re allowing into medical school now in eight or 10 years?” he questioned. “We need to be planning a decade ahead, because it takes a decade to train a physician.”
Health economists have warned that in a system that is still largely based on paying doctors a fee for every service they do, an oversupply of doctors could see more doctors doing more tests and procedures on a smaller number of patients each in order to ensure they earn a decent living.
The report on the supply of doctors was released in tandem with one that delves into what provinces and territories pay doctors.
Trying to arrive at a representative figure is complicated because the health statistics agency doesn’t get enough data to report on one stream that makes up about 25 per cent of the payments from provinces and territories to doctors, said Yvonne Rosehart, program lead for the physician team in CIHI’s health human resources unit.
CIHI calls that stream “alternative” payments, referring to monies paid to doctors who are on salaries in family practices, who get bonuses to work in rural areas where the fee-for-service model doesn’t really work, or who get other types of bonuses.
The remaining 75 per cent of payments to doctors covers fee-for-service billings.
Some doctors would make most of their income through the fee-for-service, but others would receive payments through a mixture of the two. For instance, some physicians may work the occasional hospital shift in addition to their private practice, earning a salary per shift for the one and fee-for service payments for the other, Sweetman said.
Looking at only the fee-for-service numbers, the agency estimates that on average family doctors earned a gross income of $239,000 last year and specialists earned a gross of $341,000.
Those figures would not be a doctor’s actual income — a doctor who ran his or her own office would have to cover the office overhead out of those gross figures, Rosehart said.
The report said doctors’ salaries increased by 7.4 per cent in 2010, down slightly from the 9.7 per cent and 8.8 per cent increases of the previous two years.
In terms of numbers, there were 203 physicians for every 100,000 Canadians in 2010, up 35 per cent from the rate in 1980. The number of doctors per 100,000 Canadians rose in all provinces and territories — except Yukon and Northwest Territories — over the past five years.

Source:

Surgery wait times for elective medical treatments in Canada are on the rise according to a new report released Monday by the Fraser Institute.
This year’s version of the right wing think-tank’s annual report, titled Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, notes the median surgical wait time jumped to 19.0 weeks from 18.2 weeks in 2010, exceeding the previous all-time high of 18.3 weeks recorded in 2007.
By comparison, in 1993, the average wait time was 9.3 weeks which equates to a 104 per cent increase in 18 years.
Among the various specialties, the shortest total waits exist for medical oncology (4.2 weeks), radiation oncology (4.6 weeks), and elective cardiovascular surgery (10.3weeks).
Conversely, the report notes, patients wait longest between a GP referral and plastic surgery (41.6 weeks), orthopaedic surgery (39.1 weeks), and neuro surgery (38.3 weeks).
“Canadians are being forced to wait almost four-and-a-half months, on average, to receive surgical care, prolonging the pain and suffering patients and their families are forced to endure,” said the report’s co-author, Mark Rovere, in an accomanying press release.
“Despite significant increases in government health spending, Canadians are still waiting too long to access medically necessary treatment.”
“It’s time for policy makers to embrace sensible reforms that have worked in other industrialized countries with universal-access health care systems.”
Total waiting time by province: (the wait between referral by a general practitioner and receiving treatment):
Ontario: 14.3 weeks
British Columbia: 19.3 weeks
Quebec: 19.9 weeks
Alberta: 21.1 weeks
Newfoundland and Labrador: 22.8 weeks
Manitoba: 25 weeks
New Brunswick: 27.5 weeks
Nova Scotia: 29 weeks
Saskatchewan: 29 weeks
Prince Edward Island: 43.9 weeks*
*The report notes that the number of survey responses from Canada’s smallest province was lower than most others, which may result in reported median wait times being higher or lower than those actually experienced.
It is estimated that, across all 10 provinces, in 2011 people are waiting for an estimated 941,321 procedures.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/report-says-canadians-waiting-104-per-cent-longer-155659912.html