Less is More – Focus on the Essential

This is a time of change. Change forced by the fact that the current way of serving our patients is not sustainable. We need to change how we do business, if we want to fulfill our mandate in the years to come and also serve the coming generations of patients. You all know that WRHA must balance its budget for this fiscal year. In addition, a profound consolidation of acute care in the city has been announced by the Minister of Health and WRHA on April 7 (for updates see http://healingourhealthsystem.ca/).

There is also change at the university side: a new model of budgeting/financing has been introduced, this fiscal year is still parallel with the old model, but to take over entirely in the next fiscal year.

When faced with changes in the environment that are so profound as the ones mentioned above, one has to step back and ask what is the core business one absolutely has to fulfill, what is nice to have but not essential, and what can be done by somebody else. Or as Steve Jobs once put it, “deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”. More is not necessarily better; in fact, less is usually more, and doing every-thing definitely not an option.

It is absolutely clear that the overall funding envelope for our Department and WRHA program will likely contract, at best remain stable in the mid-term future, i.e. funding will shrink at least on an inflation corrected basis.

The core areas of an academic Department of Internal Medicine include providing tertiary patient care, train the next generation of (academic) physicians, and advance the field through research and innovation. To be able to accomplish this in the current environment, we will not only need to find efficiencies, but will have to learn to live with-out all the nice-to-haves that are not absolutely essential.

Doing so, we need to pursue what is best for the greater good, and refrain from fighting tooth and nail for our pet projects, as difficult as it may be. If we do this, all together as a team, we will not only weather the storm, but stay successful as a Department!

Eberhard Renner, MD