The list

Ontario’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure List is a rather crude measuring stick. As a friend and faithful reader is quick to point out when the Sunshine List is mentioned in these pages and elsewhere, it offers a narrow, and somewhat voyeuristic, view into the business of our public institutions. His chief complaint is that the $100,000 threshold for reporting public sector salaries hasn’t budged since the information was first gathered and made public back in 1997. Yet $100,000 today isn’t what it was 16 years ago—inflation has eaten the value of that salary level such that a $100,000 salary in 1997 would be roughly equivalent to $145,000 today. Many of those on the list in 2013 would have been spared from this bit of exposure had the threshold kept pace with inflation.

Nevertheless the list remains one of the few tools, crude as it may be, we have at our disposal to assess these organizations. It can help us determine, in rough terms, whether they are in line with similar institutions, or trending in a way that matches our own experiences and expectations.

Last week Quinte Health Care chair Brian Smith complained to a radio reporter that in his opinion, it isn’t helpful for a community to merely state they don’t want cuts to their hospitals— that if they wished to be helpful, they would offer solutions to the hospital corporation’s funding squeeze.

That sounds like an invitation to take a closer look—even with this crude instrument.

When I began covering the plight of Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital in 2004— then just a few years entangled into the dysfunctional forced marriage with BGH, Trenton Memorial and North Hastings—only seven folks at QHC earned enough to rank on the Sunshine List.

This past year 61 QHC staffers ascended to the list. Sixty-one. Nearly a ninefold increase. Now in fairness—had the $100,000 threshold been adjusted for inflation most of these folks salaries would not have appeared on the 2013 list. Just 13 QHC staffers earned enough last year had the benchmark kept up with inflation.

Still, the 61 folks earning more than $100,000 seem to tell us something about this institution, its priorities and how it compares to its peers.

For the purpose of my comparison I stayed away from the densely urban hospitals and focused on a handful of hospitals chosen to more or less reflect the character of this community. Only one, Pembroke Regional Hospital, with 203 beds, is closely comparable in capacity to QHC’s 206 beds, though it operates from just one site. Two of the hospitals—Cornwall and Bluewater Health-manage more than one hospital.

In attempting to measure the relative leanness of the hospitals’ managerial ranks, I took the number of beds and divided it by the number of folks on the 2013 Sunshine List to give a ratio of these high earners to the number of beds.

What I found was that none of the eight hospitals I looked at, either larger or smaller, had as many folks earning more than $100,000 per year as QHC. Most hospitals, it seems manage with about one person on the Sunshine List to every 10 beds or so. But QHC has a staffer earning $100,000 or more for just 3.4 beds.

Even much larger hospitals—including Peterborough Regional Hospital with nearly 500 beds, or Bluewater Health with 325—had fewer folks on the Sunshine List than QHC.

Peterborough spent $4.7 million on its staffers earning more than $100,000. Pembroke, remember with the same number of beds as QHC, spent $2.8 million on these folks. QHC meanwhile lavished $7.4 million upon the 61 folks who earned more than $100,000 last year—more than two and a half times more than the comparably sized hospital in Pembroke!

Now it must be said again that these are poor measures. Those who make the Sunshine List are not a good proxy for managerial ranks. Peterborough may have 100 folks earning $95,000 and they wouldn’t show up in this data.

Nevertheless, QHC seems to have more than its fair share of high earners.

So if the QHC chair is truly looking for suggestions as how to solve the hospital corporation’s financial woes, many in Prince Edward County and elsewhere will recommend trimming the ranks of QHC’s managerial staff as a preferable, and perhaps obvious, place to start—rather than continuing to eliminate services, staffing and beds at the Picton hospital.

Certainly the corporation would fail to work without these folks—it is not as immediately clear that patients would notice the difference.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca