The latest staff cuts in the IWK Health Centre’s mental health services are part of a plan to serve more patients, says a senior hospital official.

Jocelyn Vine, vice-president of patient services, said the youth-care worker positions that will be eliminated will be replaced with other staff, such as licensed practical nurses and social workers.

She said 16 of about 40 positions will go as the hospital consolidates children’s and youth services into one location. She said the location has yet to be determined.

“By bringing those two groups of patients and their teams together, we’re able to deliver care more efficiently, and that will allow us to reduce some of the youth-care worker staff,” Vine said Friday.

The number of workers will be more than 16, since some work part time, she said.

The news, delivered to the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union on Thursday, comes after 22 layoffs were announced in March.

Vine said youth-care workers help deliver care plans, assist families with coping strategies and aid patients making the transition from being an in-patient to going home or moving between services.

She said the remaining youth-care workers will continue to do that work, but bringing the services together means fewer of them are needed.

The hospital will hire more clinicians instead, Vine said. That, in turn, allows for more day patient slots, eight to 12 for adolescents and six for children.

“Our biggest goal is to provide access to care,” she said. “We know that patients and families are waiting too long.”

Vine said there will be two fewer in-patient beds for adolescents who don’t require acute care. There are no bed losses for acute-care patients or children, she said.

After the first round of layoffs in March, Vine said cutting back the in-patient program was the best way to reorganize funding. She also said research shows patients do better when they stay with their own families.

Liberal health critic Leo Glavine said he doesn’t agree the cuts will lead to improved service. He said the youth-care workers deal with a whole range of issues young people deal with.

“They go out into the community, they go into the schools to continue after the three or four months that these young people are in the (Adolescent Centre for Treatment) program,” Glavine said.

“I see ... those kinds of real, everyday connections with young people re-establishing in their homes and in the community being totally disrupted and, in fact, will probably disappear.”

On Thursday, union spokesman Neil McNeil said the cuts were a blow to the morale of the remaining youth-care workers at the hospital.

“It leaves people behind feeling very discouraged,” he said.

(djackson@herald.ca)