VMDAS/VPSA board and staff meet regularly with VCH senior leaders to develop a collaborative relationship between medical staff and the health authority. The May meeting focused on funding available to support joint VPSA/VCH initiatives with presentations from Doctors of BC’s Engagement Manager Ronnie Hamman and VCH Regional Practice Support Leader Brian Lane.

Facility Engagement contingency funding

The Specialist Services Committee’s Facility Engagement Initiative provides funding to 76 medical staff associations across the province including VMDAS’s VPSA. Additional contingency funding is available to these MSAs to support one-time unanticipated needs. Proposals need to engage the MSA and its health authority and demonstrate an appropriate need for additional funding over and above the MSA’s annual allocation. Funded projects are specific to the MSA making the application.

Funded projects could be activities that unexpectedly exceeded the time and expense of the annual FE budget or new, unanticipated activities that require new funding. Requests must be approved by the cochairs of the Facility Engagement Working Group. The annual province-wide budget for contingency funding is $750,000.

VPSA has accessed FE contingency funding only once to date. This was for the formation of the EPIC Task Group. This funding could potentially be used to fund additional department retreats to address recruitment and retention concerns.

Facility Engagement regional funding

The goals of this funding are to connect, build consensus and encourage collaboration between MSAs at the regional and sub-regional levels. At VCH, this would be projects that include all nine MSAs or, at the sub-regional level, several of these nine MSAs (e.g., VA/VC and Richmond Hospital and Lions Gate Hospital). The annual budget for this funding is set at $100,000 per region.

This funding can be used for activities with MSA and health authority participation that address co-identified engagement priorities and system issues affecting physicians’ work environments and patient care. It can also be used for regional and sub-regional tables as well as for networking and knowledge-sharing events. Funding can be used for MSA/health authority regional or sub-regional tables or regional and/or sub-regional activities that are supported by multiple MSAs and the health authority. Applications for regional funding are submitted to the SSC’s facility engagement director.

In this current fiscal year, VCH has so far been allocated $60,000 in FE regional funding: $22,000 for three meetings of the VCH President’s Table and $38,000 for five meetings of the VCH Rural and Remote President’s Table.

Health system redesign funding

Doctors of BC offers several funding avenues for projects; one of these is health system redesign, which enables broad physician engagement in health authority projects. The goal of this funding is to ensure physicians are engaged and have the opportunity to participate in planning, decision making, and implementation of new or revised health services that contribute to alignment across the health system and reflect the application of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Quintuple Improvement Framework.

This funding is intended to assist health authorities to receive meaningful physician input and engagement (via sessional payments). It can be applied to time-limited redesign projects or broad-scale physician engagement in health authority redesign activities. Initiatives are funded through the Physician Master Agreement with $1.35 million allocated over three years.

Leveraging the Medical Affairs calendar

In addition to discussing these funding opportunities, the possibility of VPSA accessing Medical Affair’s e-mail list to promote joint VPSA and VCH or VA/VC events was raised. VMDAS’s quarterly meetings are now advertised this way and there has been a considerable uptake in attendance. Accessing this for events such as the upcoming VC Appreciation Event on June 3 would be valuable.

More thought and discussion are needed regarding this suggestion.

Next meeting

The group next meets on June 12. If you have an item you wish to be brought forward at these meetings, please contact VPSA Operations Director Andrew Pinfold.