(Montreal) Santé Québec assures that it wants to avoid job cuts for health personnel who work in emergencies.
Posted at 12:47 p.m.
Katrine Desautels
The Canadian Press
“In the criteria that we gave ourselves in the budgetary rigor measures, it is that all the care and services that we call “urgent or critical””, so these are the emergency rooms, but there are other sectors too, we really need to keep them protected. This is really our intention,” said Frédéric Abergel, executive vice-president of operations and transformation at Santé Québec.
He made this statement Friday during Santé Québec’s weekly press briefing on the situation in Quebec emergencies. Although overall occupancy rates in emergency departments remain high, there is a slight decrease compared to the same period last year. Between 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, the stretcher occupancy rate increased from 126% to 121%, for the period from December 31 to January 13.
Asked whether the job cuts which are increasing due to the 1.5 billion budget cuts imposed in the public health network will have an impact on emergency room traffic, Mr. Abergel replied that it was too early to find out.
We are in real contact with health establishments every week to understand the measures they would like to put in place. Our primary objective is to have the least impact on the services offered to the population.
-Frédéric Abergel, executive vice-president of operations and transformation at Santé Québec
“Generally speaking, for us, what is very important is budgetary rigor obviously, but really ensuring that all services are fully available to the population and that we create as few delays as possible. “waiting too,” added the vice-president of Santé Québec.
He welcomed another positive indicator in hospitals, namely the average length of stay which increased from 20.1 hours to 18.6 hours in one year, which represents an improvement of 1.5 hours per patient .
“We haven’t even been in place for two months,” recalled Mr. Abergel. We are really in the process of taking the network that we inherited from 1is December and to make daily corrections as well as improvements and to work with the teams on how we want to transform the network in the coming years. »
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