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LifeLabs closes facilities while monitoring local congestion

March 17, 2016   ·   0 Comments

LifeLabs, Ontario’s largest medical laboratory company, is making some changes across the province – changes that include closing testing facilities as well as monitoring congestion in its Orangeville and Shelburne collection centres.

Over the next few months, the firm will be closing testing facilities in Thorold, London and Ottawa, where samples are analyzed. They will also be consolidating 15 patient service centres (PSC), which collect and process patient samples, with ones that are located nearby. They will also be ending nine arrangements for local medical office collection and closing two sessional sites and reducing hours of operation at 53 PSC locations. The company will also be letting go of 100 staff. The goal is to make the company more efficient.

“While these kinds of operational decisions are never easy, we believe they are necessary,” said Sue Paish, president and CEO of LifeLabs, in an open letter to patients, health care providers and customers on the company’s website.

Ms. Paish said the government has been cutting funds for medical laboratory services while costs are mounting and the labs are seeing a higher volume of patients – the demand is increasing but the funding has not.

“We (LifeLabs) are always looking at how we can continue to deliver services with exceptional quality and value for money for Ontarians,” she stated. “Over the last several years, we have demonstrated tremendous efficiency by managing a growing volume of patients resulting in service and inflationary pressures while at the same time operating within a constrained fiscal environment. Compounding these cost pressures, we have absorbed a series of government funding reductions in Ontario over this period.

“Today, the need to demonstrate maximum efficiency and value for money has never been greater. We have completed a comprehensive review of our services in Ontario with the objective of finding additional operational savings that will have the least impact on our patients, physicians and Ontarians.”

LifeLabs is the only remaining medical laboratory in Orangeville. The private company manages hundreds of medical laboratories in Ontario and British Columbia and, according to its website, performs more than 75 million clinical tests in Ontario alone each year. Despite the changes, which will take place over the coming weeks and months, LifeLabs assured The Citizen patients in Orangeville will not be negatively affected.

“Our locations in Orangeville and Shelburne will not be impacted by the recently announced changes to our operations in Ontario,” said Stephanie Sayer, communications manager for LifeLabs. “As a result of the closures of physician office collection services in the Orangeville area, the LifeLabs Orangeville Patient Service Centre is now the only community laboratory providing collection services in the Orangeville area.”

The company has been monitoring the Orangeville location and making service adjustments to improve service.

“We’re pleased to advise that recent changes we made at the Orangeville location, including adjustments to our internal processes and scheduling, is allowing us to service patients more quickly and efficiently,” she said. “The patients in Orangeville have been very supportive and we want to thank them for their patience over the past several weeks. We will continue to monitor our performance in Orangeville and will make adjustments to our services as required to address patient volumes.”

The announcement regarding the LifeLabs closures came less than three years after the company’s $1.2 billion takeover of Mississauga-based CML Healthcare Inc. in 2013.  At the time, the Ontario Coalition for Lab Reform (OCLR) stated it was opposed to the amalgamation as it would create a “giant, corporate mega lab” and warned that it would result in lab closures.

The OCLR is a group composed of medium and smaller-sized, owner-operated laboratories and laboratory services that have been serving Ontarians an average of 40 years, together with concerned clinical and laboratory healthcare professionals.

“We want to see a modern community laboratory system put in place that serves patients over vested large corporate interests,” said OCLR spokesperson and former Liberal MPP and MP Gerard Kennedy.

“We believe Ontario patients benefit if there are diverse sources of community testing services – small, medium and large private – as well as public hospitals and non-profit test brokers. Ontario is the only province to give over 90 per cent of its laboratory tests by official regulation to two large private corporate laboratories (a legal lab test ‘cartel’), and shut out any other healthcare organizations, even if they are willing to do a better job at a lower price.”

The OCLR’s mandate is to propose evidence-based solutions that can increase patient services, at a lower cost to the government, with full public transparency and accountability.

“We want to phase out what we consider the worst laboratory payments system anywhere, in that it rewards organizations regardless of the access or quality they provide, is almost entirely secretive, and replace it with a simpler and transparent ‘pay following the patient’ with published public standards overseen by a Lab Secretariat headed by a Labs Commissioner,” added Mr. Kennedy, who is also CEO of Alpha Healthcare/Alpha Laboratories, Ontario’s fourth largest community medical laboratory.

In the 2016 provincial budget, the government advised the community laboratories that there would be a reduction of $50 million in funding this year or about 7.5 per cent, to be accomplished through lower prices for tests that technology has made cheaper to produce.

“This was long expected and we believe it does not require any reduction in services if done in the right manner,” Mr. Kennedy stated. “After five years of being restrained by a government ‘Performance Fund,’ requiring service levels to be kept up and improved, and by the possibility of other labs stepping in, in the last few months the two largest laboratories have started to cut services and lay off healthcare professionals to save costs and increase their profits.”

He added that from 2012 to 2015, over 40 new patient service centres were opened and 88,000 new service hours provided, all at no cost to the government. The government changed some of the way labs were paid to allow new sites to open in areas of need, which is how Mr. Kennedy said he was able to open an Alpha Laboratory location in Erin.

“Now there is a trend in the other direction and we have learned the government plans to cancel its community laboratory Performance Fund,” he noted. “From 1997 to 2011 there were 100 patients’ access points closed by larger corporate labs, and two-thirds of direct doctor office services were eliminated by the same organizations, at enormous cost savings to the entities making the cuts. Larger corporate laboratories took over other organizations and then shut down facilities to improve profits. The published profits of Ontario large corporate community laboratories when they were publicly held corporations were as high as 45 per cent, an unheard of level for this kind of service.”

According to a review done in BC, Ontario communities now have 50 per cent fewer public access points than BC or Quebec.

Patients in Orangeville have been waiting up to two hours to receive a blood test at the local laboratory. The OCLR was able to convince the government to lower wait times starting in 2011, when they began to fine labs which cut hours or closed locations. Last year a new mandatory electronic measuring system was installed at all locations. Unfortunately, the government is planning to formally set wait time targets, but not until 2017.

“We believe wait times do not need to exceed half an hour in most circumstances, and should be normally just several minutes,” said Mr. Kennedy.

He explained that the government actually has several powerful tools they can use to resolve the situation. It is responsible for awarding laboratory licences under provincial legislation without which laboratories cannot operate, and it provides 95 per cent of the funding for testing, controls quality standards and is able to direct labs “in the public interest.”

“Many issues in the medical system cannot be easily fixed but this can,” Mr. Kennedy said. “The large corporate labs have been able to obtain a very weak system of government oversight over time, but that can be rapidly changed. As an interim measure, it could bring back the Performance Fund and the services would be restored tomorrow.”

He encourages everyone to make their voice heard on the matter.

“We worry that without adequate public input from doctors, nurse practitioners and patients who use the system every day. The government may be at risk of making the wrong choices,” he said. “The closures of services across the province are a sign of that. It is time for affected patients and healthcare providers to speak up. They can visit our website at www.OCLR.ca and we will make sure their perspective is passed on the Health Ministry, MPPs and the Minister and keep them informed of progress.”

A visit Wednesday afternoon to the Orangeville LifeLabs site in the Fairgrounds Shopping Centre disclosed that only a couple of patients were in the waiting room.

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