The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is spending $220,500 on a consulting firm to help it figure out how to close three hospitals emergency rooms and an urgent care centre without impacting patient care.

The WRHA has hired Deloitte Ltd. for a 10-week contract to provide “planning solutions” and to help it make “strategic decisions” for its controversial hospital reorganization plan, the Winnipeg Sun has learned.

The contract begins this month but will conclude only a few weeks before the WRHA shuts down Victoria Hospital’s emergency department Oct. 3 and turns it into an urgent care centre. Misericordia Urgent Care Centre, which is already closed late evenings and overnight, is expected to shut down entirely the same day. Two more ERs will close next year.

It’s all part of the Pallister government’s plan to consolidate hospital services in what the province says is an effort to reduce ER wait times in the city.

However, it remains unclear how closing three ERs and an urgent care centre will achieve that goal, even with the extra capacity planned for the three remaining ERs at Grace Hospital, St. Boniface Hospital and Health Sciences Centre. And that’s where Deloitte comes in.

The consulting firm is expected to help the WRHA figure out how 300,000 ER patients a year in Winnipeg can get quicker and better service at fewer locations by creating “WRHA-unique decision support tools” to help management make “informed strategic decisions regarding future utilization and capacities across the region,” according to the request for proposal issued last month.

“The interactive decision support tools will be based on unique WRHA operational and patient data and will position the planning team to test capacities and utilization at the remaining facilities once the closures in the region are complete,” the RFP says.

The WRHA said this week Deloitte will help the WRHA predict patient flow patterns.

“The interactive tool will allow staff to input data such as number of available patient beds and lengths of stay to test strategies, responses and capacity in the system to meet demand,” a WRHA spokesperson said in a statement.

In other words, they’re not sure they even have the capacity at the three remaining sites to handle what will be a massive influx of patients once the roll-out is complete. So, they’ve hired an expensive consulting firm to help them figure that out.

Which is not exactly what the public was told nearly four months ago when this plan was first unveiled.

When Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen and WRHA brass announced the reorganization plan April 7, they made it sound like they already had all this ironed out. They insisted the plan was ready to go. In fact, two months later they provided the public with a specific timeline on when ERs would close and what steps would be taken to add capacity to the remaining ER sites.

Yet two months before they pull the trigger on this thing they’ve hired a consulting firm to help them figure out how to make it work.

Meanwhile, the WRHA is still reviewing responses to two other tenders it issued earlier this summer, one for “enhanced home care service,” and the other for a 65-bed “transitional care” unit. Both are strategies to decant hospitals of long-term care patients to free up inpatient beds. Enhanced home care is supposed to help elderly patients return home where they may otherwise have continued to wait in hospital for personal care home placement. The transitional care unit is designed to transfer similar patients out of hospital while decisions are made about what type of community care those patients need.

Both are critical components of the reorganization plan because they’re designed to free up hospital space in order to improve patient flow, including in emergency rooms.

But it could be weeks, maybe months, before they’re up and running since the WRHA still hasn’t selected the providers of those services.

In the meantime, the rush is still on to start closing ERs in only 64 days.

Seems like they’re cutting it pretty close.