Looking ahead at the financial situation in 2023
The main challenges in healthcare
In recent years we have seen an increasing demand for complex care. Due to an aging population combined with increasing medical capabilities, the demand for complex care will only continue to rise in the coming years At the same time, we are experiencing a tremendous tightness in the labor market across the board and as a result are facing challenges both in terms of recruiting and retaining colleagues. Our healthcare professionals already experience the current workload as high, and the absentee rate is unfortunately considerable. In addition, our resources available for care are under pressure. In the already signed Integral Healthcare Agreement (IZA), it was agreed to limit healthcare spending. This will require significant transformation and means that we must:
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Prevent people from falling ill.
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Ensure that patients arrive at the right place fast.
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Organize care differently.
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Pay a lot of attention to engaging and retaining our (healthcare) staff.
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Implement innovations based on research.
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Offer differentiating education.
Transformation agreements and deployment of transformation resources
To provide appropriate care, the IZA places more emphasis than in the past on collaboration between health care parties, including across health care domains To facilitate this, the IZA includes agreements on equal contracting for impactful care transformations. This allows us, as a healthcare provider, to submit transformation plans to health insurers, and if necessary request temporary transformation funds. These plans can tie in with our own initiatives for care transformation and/or with regional images and plans that will be drawn up.
Concerns regarding inflation and CLA increases
The increase in our costs in 2023 and future years will not keep pace with compensation to be realized on the income side. Combined with the increase in capital costs due to our aging buildings, this means we will be forced to make substantial financial adjustments in the coming years. We shall do this on the basis of the Healthcare of Tomorrow movement . In order to maintain our financially healthy position even in the short term, we will have to make the necessary choices throughout 2023 and in the budget for 2024 to redesign our operations differently, more effectively, and more efficiently.
Significant investments in accommodation and ICT
Due to the age of our buildings, large-scale renovations in various places will be necessary in the next few years. We will be conducting all activities over the next fifteen years. To tackle these building and financial challenges in a proper way, we have drawn up an integral vision on accommodation . This vision defines an execution in several phases, with a recalibration and evaluation before the start of each subsequent phase. At the moment we are preparing the transition to a next phase. Hereby, the entire vision will once again be recalculated financially and submitted for external approval. An important issue here is the development of sharply rising building costs over the past period. We shall not start with the next phase before it has clearly been concluded that the entire package of renovation projects is financially feasible. We expect that attraction of additional funding will only take place from around 2026.
In the coming years we shall also have to invest in ICT due to the steadily increasing digitization of processes within UMC Utrecht, developments in the fields of e-Health and big data, and scheduled investments to replace IT components (hardware, system software, and applications).
