Tag: Health

The Admin Burden That’s Really Killing Family Practice

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the “administration burden” faced by family physicians. The Ontario College of Family Physicians estimates family doctors spend up to 19 hours a week on “paper work”. Given there are only so many hours in a week, the more hours spent doing paperwork, the less hours seeing patients.

It also contributes to situations where people just get too frustrated with family medicine, and quit. Twenty percent of Toronto family doctors are planning on leaving within five years. This bad karma is not lost on medical students, who, as I mentioned in a previous blog – are avoiding family practice like the plague, worsening a crisis that has been years in the making.

But what exactly is this “administration burden”? What’s the “paper work” that is driving us all to frustration? I would argue it’s not paper per se, it’s digital.

That’s not to say there isn’t paper. I frequently get asked for completely pointless sick notes from employers, impractical forms to return to work and seemingly useless – “we agreed your patient was permanently disabled, but we want a one year update to make sure your patient is still permanently disabled” forms from the pointy headed bureaucrats at insurance companies. But I’ve taken a somewhat mercenary approach to those forms in order to keep myself sane.

A sick note costs $20 and takes about a minute to write. A form the insurance company asks for usually takes a few minutes to fill out and I charge $40-$175 depending on the form. I reconcile the fact that these forms are a burden, with the fact that at least I make money out of them. While somewhat unscrupulous on my part, it keeps me from totally blowing my lid whenever I see one of these.

No the real admin burden comes from the completely absurd and unrelenting avalanche of reports/lab work/follow up notes – all of which present to me in a haphazard way, seemingly designed to drive me to psychiatric medications.

I took the Friday of Eid ul Fitr off to celebrate with my family. On Saturday, I logged into my Electronic Medical Record (EMR), correctly realizing that if I waited until Monday, the EMR inbox would crush my sorry soul.

Unsurprisingly, I had a total of 75 labs/reports/messages about patients to review. It wasn’t so much the number of items to take care of, (truly if they were straight forward it wouldn’t have been too bad). It was rather how badly and inefficiently the information came to me that sucked all of the happiness I had enjoyed on Eid from my spirit.

One method of getting information to me is via a system called Hospital Report Manager (HRM). I look at HRM in my EMR and see a report on a renal transplant patient from Sick Kids. But the note was “uncategorized” which meant that I had to go into the HRM software and enter the category “nephrologist” in the report. The VERY NEXT report in my HRM in box was……the exact same report on the exact same patient, but this time HRM had categorized the report as being from a cardiologist – so I had to go in, change the report once again to “nephrologist” and I now have two copies of the same report.

By the way – Sick Kid’s hospital provides exceptional medical and nursing care to my patients, but ever since they switched their hospital IT systems to a company called EPIC there has been no end of issues like this. The only thing that software is epic at is causing physician distress.

That’s not all. HRM has more goodies awaiting for me. There’s a report from my colleague Dr. Collings on his expert management of a wrist fracture on one of my patients. Thorough, comprehensive, and well done. Except HRM has auto-categorized him to be a gynaecologist So yes, I either have inaccurate information in my patients chart, or I go back and re-categorize the report to reflect that Dr. Collings is an orthopaedic surgeon.

Next up, HRM has a report from an Emergency Room physician about a patient who was seen and apparently had some abnormal bloodwork. Not life threatening, so asked to follow up with me. Only problem is the blood work from the hospital doesn’t come to me via HRM. Now I have to go to that patients chart, and access yet another system called OLIS, log into that and download the lab work from the hospital. But wait the note from the ER was unfortunately late getting to me (about 10 days out). OLIS is set up to auto download for the past seven days, unless I click more buttons, and back date – which I have to do.

Next up, a report from HRM that a patient of mine had a Covid swab done. But HRM won’t tell me if the swab was positive or negative. Just that it was done. Now I go back to that patient chart and access OLIS where the result is, adding yet more steps to my day.

Next come messages (yes, that’s on top of HRM and OLIS). I note a message from the local Shoppers Drug Mart asking for a renewal of blood pressure medications for a patient of mine. Only problem is that a brief look at the chart shows I sent a one year supply of that same medicine to the Shoppers three months ago, and they accepted this and downloaded it. I tell the pharmacy staff who tell me they “can’t find it” which leads to……well, let’s just say a deterioration in the conversation.

As an aside, while I’m not allowed to endorse any specific pharmacy, I will say I’ve generally found care to be much better when provided by smaller, independent pharmacists who build relationships with their patients, rather than big chains that just seem to fly in itinerant staff.

Anyway, you get the point. In total it took about 3 hours on Saturday to sort through this mess and it just doesn’t have to be this way. The reason I wrote a blog about Health IT in Turkiye was to show that other countries do a much better job of managing this burden. I’m sure there are other examples and we need to learn from them.

The vast majority of my family practice colleagues practice family medicine because they genuinely like their patients, like providing comprehensive care, value the relationships built over time and feel like they make a difference in peoples lives. But unless we do something about this administration burden, I fear more and more will leave the profession, because at some point, being human, they just won’t be able to take it any more.

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What if We Didn’t Lose the Doctors We Trained?

Canada is in the midst of doctor shortage. In particular there are at least 6 million Canadians with out family doctor. The situation is worsening. The most recent Canadian Residency Match for medical students applying to specialties, showed that there were 268 empty spots for family medicine after the first round. This is the highest number of unmatched family medicine positions ever. Medical Students, being really smart people, are viewing family medicine as a dead end specialty and avoiding it like the plague.

If only the boorish loudmouth who predicted we were heading in this direction six years ago and been listened to…..

Governments at both federal and provincial levels are taking steps to try to address this. In British Columbia, they have introduced a capitation based payment model for family physicians (think of it as salary + performance bonuses). Ontario has a model like this that had great success in the early 2000’s. The federal government pledged more spending on health care in the future. Ontario plans the “largest expansion of medical school education in ten years.” And so on.

But what would have things been like if successive governments didn’t drive doctors away from Canada in the first place?

Going back as far as the 1990s, inept governments have, over the years, done their best to make physicians feel unwelcome. The Bob (“I am super elite“) Rae NDP government of 1990-1995 in Ontario implemented the Barer-Stoddart report. This report decided “there were too many doctors” (I kid you not) and cut medical school enrolment by 10%. Three decades later we are still feeling the adverse ramifications created by that move.

Similarly, the disreputable Kathleen Wynne Ontario Liberal government went to war with physicians in the mid 2010s, led by her woefully incompetent Health Minister Eric Hoskins, and his inept sidekick, Deputy Minister Bob Bell. Those geniuses thought it was a good idea to CUT 50 residency positions (training for doctors) and only saw the light during a deathbed confession just in time for the 2018 election. In particular, Hoskins and Bell’s blatant disregard and borderline contempt for family physicians resulted in, as OMA Vice-Chair Audrey Karlinsky put it, 6 years of family medicine graduates not choosing comprehensive family medicine.

Do you think supporting hundreds of those young potential family docs then would have made a difference now when 2.2 Million Ontario residents are without a family doctor?

To prove that idiocy in health care management can occur with parties of all political stripes, the former Alberta Conservative Health Minister, the combustible Tyler Shandro, actually verbally attacked a physician at his home in Alberta, along with, you guessed it, going to war with physicians in his own province. Really helps to retain physicians, no?

In my first ever blog for the Huffington Post (seven years ago!), I pointed out to then Health Minister Eric Hoskins that 30% of my graduating class no longer worked in Ontario due to Bob Rae’s intransigence. I urged Hoskins to change his behaviour or that by the time of the next election, health care would be in a worse crisis and hinted his government would pay the price in the 2018 election. (I wonder if Kathleen Wynne regrets sticking with him as health minister for so long, despite the fact he was obviously not up to the task).

Admittedly, that’s one person’s recollection. Are there any statistics out there that show just how many Canadian trained doctors have left Canada? There are, although they are really hard to come by, and not as up to date as I’d like. Huge shout out to Dr. Mary Fernando for digging these up for me.

In 2000, the OECD published a report on the mobility of health care professionals. On page 50, it indicated that 19% of doctors born in Canada were working in other countries. Given the crisis we see in health care around us right now, do you think it would help if we could have retained those doctors in Canada?

But wait, aren’t we trying get international medical graduates (IMGs) to come to Canada? Ontario health minister Sylvia Jones did direct colleges to come up with a way to speed up the ability to get foreign doctors licensed. But it turns out we have trouble keeping them as well. A study on retention patterns of IMGs in Canada showed that 12% of IMGs were approved to practice in Canada between 2005 and 2011 LEFT Canada by 2015. While IMGs apply, we have trouble retaining them too.

Clearly, governments need to focus on retention of physicians just as much (if not more so) than recruiting new physicians. What can they do?

The federal government can do a couple of things to help. First it can heed the results of a poll taken by the Medical Post magazine (I voted just before closing and these were the results):

Doctors don’t have pensions and benefits mostly due to some weird federal tax laws. Changing these should be easy and offering pensions and benefits would be a strong way to retain physicians. Similarly, reversing the 2017 tax changes that completely threw retirement planning out the window for doctors would be a big help.

Provincial governments should of course, take note of the fact that going to war with doctors always leads to a deterioration in health care for the residents of their province. But since most politicians are incapable of thinking about anything but their own self interest, let me point out three facts.

In 1995, after going to war with doctors, the Bob Rae NDP government was turfed from power in Ontario and the NDP has yet to form a provincial government since. In 2018, after going to war with doctors, the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government was decimated in the Ontario election, even losing official party status, which they have yet to regain. In 2022 after going to war with doctors, Alberta Premier Jason Kenny had to resign as premier because his own party saw the writing on the wall.

The message is clear. Going to war with doctors is bad for health care and bad for political careers. It’s time politicians realized that, and came up with meaningful solutions like pensions to retain the ones we train.

Canada’s Health Care Landscape has Changed Since the Canada Health Act

I’m honoured to have Dr. Silvy Mathew guest blog for me today. She’s a former member of the OMA Board, former member of the Physicians Services Committee, has a Master’s in Health Policy and Economics, a Certificate in Global Health and is hands down one of the smartest people I know.

Health care in Canada is governed by the Canada Health Act, a federal act that essentially states that medically necessary care provided by physicians and hospitals, will be covered by public insurance and administered by each province. 

The Act was passed in 1984, and is reflective of the type of acute medical care practiced at the time. However, in 2023 (and for at least a decade prior), medical care, through technology, medical advancements and aging, has changed drastically. Publicly covered care now, however well intentioned, is sorely lacking. Ironically, because of that, it is also very expensive.

For exampe, we lack public pharmacare  for adults despite being promised this by 2006 by then Prime Minister Paul Martin. (There is some pharmacare for seniors and children).

We lack dental care. We lack appropriate home care in an aging population that is getting weaker and frailer. We lack coverage on physiotherapy. In an era of increasing mental health burdens we lack psychotherapy.

The list goes on and on, notwithstanding the severe social issues that contribute to many of these issues (healthy food, exercise, housing and all the other social determinants of health).

Because we have not invested upfront, we pay significant costs in expensive procedures, prolonged hospital stays, and medications much of which could be minimized or avoided.

Why does it matter?

McKinsey Global Institute published a prospective analysis of 200 countries, looking forward on the impact of 52 diseases over the next two decades to quantify the social and economic gains if health is made a priority by government and private sector.  They quantified the value of health to the economy and showed that if using the existing interventions we have today, we can reduce disease burden by 40% in the next 20 years and extend “active middle age by 10 years”. This translates to an economic return of $2-$4 for each $1 invested. That’s remarkable. 

What’s the hold up? The lack of foresight, upfront cost and political inertia is costing us.

We have a shortage of healthcare professionals, and we use the ones we have, in extremely inefficient ways. For example, the lack of a proper digital health infrastructure in Ontario (like they have in Turkiye!) results in duplication of services, poor coordination, and inconsistent delivery of health care. Even the electronic services we DO have don’t capitalize on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Technology advancement is a double edged sword. There are benefits to patients in terms of ongoing updated guidelines for care. But health care workers are having to do more, monitor more and change practice styles more, all leading to more individual HCW time.

Each test, often results in further testing or reassessment down the line, which compounds the problem. It’s rare that physicians just close the door on one issue a day.

Again, at the time of the Canada Health Act, we were practicing acute, limited health care. Today’s world is focused on prevention and chronic illness with monitoring. That shift has placed a huge burden on physicians time to review, inform/educate, coordinate new referrals and remind individuals to do monitoring.  Much of the time, it seems like we still don’t know how much benefit we will get from this. Hopefully the data will show we were correct to do this.

To collect and review the data though, we would need better digital systems to capture the information, which we don’t have.

Some people imply this will be managed with more “healthcare team members”. I think a huge solution for this particular issue is investing in technology and AI solutions.

Right now, we are trying and failing at holding back an avalanche.  We have technological advancements, but limited access to those. We have lack of integration of our digital infrastructure. An ageing population is leading to increased needs. But an aging health care work force is seeing retirements and illness leading to less access. New providers are available but their impact is less clear due to lesser training and duplication of services leading to increased costs. Delayed diagnoses are leading to worsened health outcomes and more expensive care. There is less preventative care due to a shortage of family physicians which leads to delayed diagnoses, worsened health outcomes and more expensive care. Lack of care giver support and home care support means that people are leaving the workforce to care for ill relatives which leads to hospital dumping. Burnout is endemic in health care, due to a feeling of disrespect and an inability to practice best patient care.

And so, physicians are in all areas of the country are giving up and closing their practices.

In the meantime, while we wait for our wishes to come true, there is opportunity to push the envelope and to drive change. People are desperate and they want options.

When access to health care is inadequate, people will choose out of jurisdiction options for delayed procedures and even screening tests. There is a moral hazard involved. People are taking risks by going elsewhere under the assumption that they will be taken care of properly.

However, with any challenges, there are opportunities. Some “non-medically necessary” medical tests (eg. screening for vitamin D) are not covered by medicare. However, it’s increasingly viewed as an early intervention. We will only see technology increase these options as better screening methods become available, and governments delay paying for them. Perhaps instead of waiting for open heart surgery or stenting, there may come a day where preventative procedures can be used to dissolve plaque in the heart arteries.

Health care faces inescapable and exponential change. However, it is unlikely, at least in the near future, that Canada (or any country’s) public health system will be able to keep up with technology and demand.

Oh for some strong, principled leadership that can see these challenges and address them head on, without resorting to political sound bites.

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Canada Should Look to Turkiye for Health Information/Data Systems

Disclosure: I have a business relationship with Medicte, a firm that provides high quality medical tourism services for Canadians. They provided me with some information for this blog. If you are on a prohibitively long waiting list for medical or surgical services, and are willing to consider travelling out of country to have treatment, contact Dr. Abdullah Erdogan at: medical.developer@mestassistance.com

I’ve written previously about Health Data Systems and what a poor job Ontario (and indeed all of Canada) does at using information technology (IT) to help with health care. Let’s look at country that does things the right way, Turkiye (formerly Turkey). I appreciate this choice may come as a surprise to many, but Turkiye has a very modern, highly efficient health care system, and had to go through their own period of transformation from a fragmented system to a more integrated one.

The long version of how Turkiye evolved their health systems can be found here. The short version is that in 2003, the Turkish government came up with the political will to introduce the Health Transformation Program. Over the next ten years this act, and unyielding political will, transformed the Turkish health care into a fully integrated system. In many ways, it’s a model for what Canada needs to do.

I had the honour of being invited to do a talk for the Canadian Turkish Business Council on the Canadian health system (along with my smarter and more esteemed colleagues Drs. Nadia Alam and Silvy Mathew). In preparation, I studied up on how Turkiye handles health data (with the help of Medicte). I cannot tell you how impressed I was with their system.

Drs. Nadia Alam, Silvy Mathew and yours truly speaking at a meeting sponsored by the Canadian Turkish Business Council

In Turkiye, the federal government has mandated that all hospitals in Turkiye use the Hospital Information Management System (HIMS). Now to be clear, different hospitals in Turkiye still use some different modules of software, but they are all compatible with HIMS. The data for all citizens of Turkiye is then backed up securely.

Then, every citizen of Turkiye is offered a patient portal called e-Nabiz.

Official logo of Turkiye’s patient portal.

What does this portal allow patients in Turkiye to do? According to Medicte:

“When people enter their E-Nabız profile, they can make appointments at all public hospitals and access the records of these appointments. They can review all of their examination, diagnosis and treatment data in the health facilities they visit and access the details of all the tests performed during this process. This includes all data related to the process, such as all laboratory tests and radiology images with their reports, prescriptions, diagnoses and drug usage details.” 

Further more, the app can be used to allow other health care providers access to patients health information (with consent). Let’s say a resident of Istanbul happens to travel to Antalya (a truly lovely tourist destination about an 8 hour drive away). If that person gets ill, they can use the E-Nabiz portal to allow doctors in Antalya to see their previous health information to help guide their care. Not only that, information about their visit in Antalya will automatically be available to their family doctor in Istanbul, including lab work, diagnosis, and prescriptions. I can’t even get health information on patients of mine that go to a walk in clinic in Barrie, and that’s only 30 minutes away from my office.

Not only does this system allow for much better communication between health care professionals of all kinds (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, home care and so on), but having knowledge of a patient’s previous health history significantly reduces duplication of tests. And leads to more optimal outcomes.

For people who are not citizens of Turkiye, but go there for medical tourism (Turkiye is one of the top medical tourist destinations in the world), their travel companies can offer them similar access to their health care records. For example, Medicte will soon offer the MestCard app via its parent company MestGroup.

Screenshots of the MestCard Apps

Essentially, a patient of mine, who choses not to wait the 13 months that they currently have to wait for a hip replacement in my area, could go to Turkiye next month, get their hip replaced AND have much better access to all their health records than a patient of mine who got that done in Canada. (And yes, all of these apps/software/portals are compliant with recent security standards).

But that’s not all, this tight integration of IT allows for other benefits. For example, Health Systems Consultant Matthew Lister, who spoke at the same event, informed how this allowed hospitals across Turkiye to manage their supply issues. If one hospital was short on something (tubing, a drug, IV fluid or so on), it can immediately check the inventory of nearby hospitals and request a transfer. No phone calls, no double checking. It’s all online, backed up, and available for hospital management to see. He also emphasized that this has been the case in Turkiye since at least 2011!

Matthew Lister speaking at the Canadian Turkish Business Council event.

In Canada, given the disastrous current state of our health care system, there have been calls for system transformation from multiple sources. Whether from what are viewed as conservative organizations like the Fraser Institute and Postmedia News, or progressive organizations like Canadian Doctors for Medicare and the Torstar Media group, everyone from all sides of the political spectrum agrees that health care is need of a fix.

Here’s thought. Rather than start from scratch, let’s look at countries like Turkiye, that have taken their own fragmented health care systems, unified them and leapfrogged Canada to develop a much more efficient health system. Then just do what they did.

The benefits to the citizens of Canada would be enormous.

Post Script: While it’s true that Turkiye has a modern, high functioning health system, even such a system can be overwhelmed by a disaster like the recent Earthquake that has claimed at least 50,000 lives. To help the victims of the earthquake in both Turkiye and Syria, I encourage you to donate to the IDRF Earthquake Relief Fund.

It’s Time to Make Health Care a Federal Responsibility

Health care is consistently viewed by Canadians as their number one priority in any federal or provincial election.  It is the largest portfolio of provincial government budgets and is responsible for a substantial proportion of the federal budget.  Yet despite all this expenditure, it continues to fail the citizens of Canada.

As I’ve repeatedly said in the past, our health system needs a bold and innovate transformation if it’s to provide care to Canadians in the 21st century.  In a previous blog, I had promised to come with some ideas on how to do that.  I submit the first step should be to make health care a federal responsibility, and not a provincial one.

Parliament of Canada, the seat of the Federal Government

I know, I know, this will require an amendment to the Canadian Constitution, a dizzyingly complex process.  But I have an idea for that as well, that I will get into later in the blog.

For now, let’s look at just some of the reasons why we should have a National Health Care system.

Canadians Already believe we have a National Health Care system

Regardless of how the division of authority is laid out, the reality is that Canadians feel that no matter where they go in this country, they will get health care paid for by their taxes.  “You shouldn’t need a credit card to pay for your health care” is a mantra that is oft repeated by politicians.  It’s part of the Canadian identity say other pundits.  Logistics aside, politically speaking, this simply is in keeping with what Canadians already think.

The Canada Health Act puts provinces in a no-win situation. 

Somewhat unbelievably, I find myself defending some politicians here (I’m just as shocked as both of my loyal readers are).  The argument presented to me by political leaders with whom I have spoken in the past was that premier’s don’t want Ottawa telling them what to do, or how to spend dollars. Certainly, we saw some of that in the wrangling over the most recent health care accord where premiers pushed back on simple things like data collection.

But I feel that it’s the premiers who are in a bind here.  The feds can go around saying, “hey, we are going to support the five principles of the Canada Health Act” and then……well do very little about ensuring that.  The premiers are stuck because they can’t violate the act. However, they have to figure out how to manage the system with declining revenues. And of course, take the flack when the system is failing.  

It’s time to make the level of government that boldly proclaims that Canadians don’t have “pay out of pocket” for health care responsible for implementing it.

The efficiency of the system will increase

I’m serious (honest).  Once again, let’s look at the most recent health accord.  The federal government agreed to increase spending on health but in return requested health data management.  In order to do so the feds propose to have “tailored bilateral agreements” with the provinces and territories.

That’s right, instead of having one team come up with a national data standard, there now have to be 13 committees to hash out how to do it.  Which means, you guessed it, 13 times the number of bureaucrats.  In 13 times the number of meetings.  If the feds ran health care, they could just have one committee to oversee the changes for the whole country.  

The same would apply to just about every other aspect of health care.  Whether determining what services are covered (there is intra provincial variation), to determining things like public health policies and so on, a unified Canada wide health system would be far more efficient.

Who knows, they might even be able to take the money saved from having 1/13th the number of bureaucrats and invest that into hiring more health care workers………nah, they’ll probably put it into more $6000 a night hotel rooms for our effete Prime Minister.

Unified Rules/Licensure requirements across the Country

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is strongly advocating for pan-Canadian licensure to deal with the physician shortage (so much so they almost make it sound like a panacea).  I support national licensure of course. Although I wish the CMA would focus on getting us pensions and getting the government to reverse the tax changes that so harmed physicians in 2017.  That would really help their members (the ones they are supposed to be serving).

But let’s be real, national licensure ain’t gonna happen with 13 separate provincial regulatory bodies all trying to generate income to run their organizations with licensing dues. 

BUT, make Health Care federal, and you only need one regulatory college that can set Canada wide standards (for all professions, not just physicians).  

Similarly, programs like national pharmacare (the one then Prime Minister Paul Martin promised us by 2006) and other programs can all be implemented more easily.  

So what are the next steps to take?

There are undoubtedly many other examples of what could run better with a single, Canada wide health system.  The big question of course, is how do we change the constitution to allow this?

Canada is due for an election by 2025.  It might happen sooner if NDP leader Jagmeet Singh tires of the foppish behaviour of our current Prime Minister and pulls his support for the “confidence and supply agreement”.  I propose that whenever that election is, there be a referendum on altering the Constitution.  (It would be better than having two separate votes).  

Canadians would go to the polls, vote for the candidate of their choice, and then have a question to answer as to whether they support amending the constitution.  Make it binding on the provincial governments.  If there is Canada wide support for this, then the provinces would have no choice but to agree to the amendment (and as pointed out earlier, it would be better for them politically anyway).

Canadians have long viewed their ability to access health care without paying out of pocket as a quintessential Canadian quality.  Having the provinces run health care may have made sense in the days of paper and telegraphs, when integration was nigh on impossible anyway. But in the 21st century, when integration is paramount to running a health care system, it makes no sense.

It’s time for the federal government to take over health care, so that the system can be run in the best interests of all Canadians.

Federal-Provincial Health Care Deal Fails Canadians

This blog has been updated to reflect that the fact that the offer from the federal government has been accepted by the provinces.

Lots of chatter about what is an agreed upon funding formula for Health Care between the provinces and the federal government. Some astronomical dollars are being thrown around and called investments in health care. But at the end of the day, will this deal mean better health care for Canadians? The sad answer, is likely no.

One of the advantages(?) of being old is that you’ve lived through lots of things, and can see the past repeating itself. Case in point, in 2004 then Prime Minister Paul Martin introduced a health care “accord” that was designed to “fix health care for a generation“. Essentially the federal government ponied up an eye watering amount of money then, and the provinces were to implement targeted programs that would:

  • Reduce wait times
  • reform Primary Care
  • Develop a National Home Care program
  • Provide a National Prescription Drug Program (by 2006!)

Now Primary Care reform did happen in Ontario, with the development of capitation based payments to family physicians. Think of it as a salary with performance bonuses and you get the gist. There was also the implementation of some Family Health Teams. I’m unaware if any of these were implemented in other Provinces. I do note with interest that British Columbia is only now getting around to reforming primary care with their own new payment model for family physicians.

But both of these programs in Ontario were summarily slashed by then Health Minister Eric Hoskins and his servile deputy Health Minister Dr. Bob Bell in 2015. Indeed their unilateral freezing of the capitation model significantly damaged primary care in Ontario, and the effects of their folly are still being badly felt today by the 2 million residents of Ontario without a family doctor.

OMA Board Vice Chair Audrey Karlinsky put it best on Twitter.

Wait times for surgical procedures however, continued to rise, and I have no idea whatever happened to the National Home Care program.

For those of you paying close attention, the same Eric Hoskins who stopped Primary Care reform in Ontario, went on chair a federal advisory council with the goal of creating a National Prescription Drug Program……….in 2018. Which hasn’t been implemented yet. I suppose being 17 years overdue is not bad by government standards.

By the way, this whole process is basically recycling a failed politician to recycle a failed government promise. And politicians seriously wonder why average Canadians like me are so cynical??

So now, 19 years later, Canadians are being told that the provinces have accepted a federal government proposal to put an eye watering $196 billion into health care, according to Prime Minister Trudeau. But wait they were committed to $150 billion anyway so it’s really only $46 billion more, but wait, when you take out the planned budgeted increases it’s only $21 billion more. Whatever.

In return, for however much money it really is, Trudeau promises there will be “tailored bilateral agreements to address“:

  • Family Health Services
  • Health workers and the backlog of health care
  • Mental health and substance abuse
  • Modernized health care system

Our politicians need to study Albert Einstein a bit more.

Here’s the sad truth about our health care system that no politician, of any political stripe seems to be willing to admit. The system is dying and in need of radical surgery. It needs a bold, transformative vision that will completely change the way we deliver health care and will leverage technology appropriately. Anything less is simply more of the same, and will not stave off the inevitable collapse of the system.

How then do we achieve this transformation that is essential to the well being of Canadians? I will go into some further thoughts about this in future blogs, but first I would implore our political leaders to stop listening to old voices who have been advising for decades (if their advice had been good we wouldn’t be in this mess). It’s time to seek out some newer voices who have bright ideas on how to restructure health care delivery in Canada.

It’s also time to wrest control of health care data management from the current group of bureaucrats in charge of it. We can’t transform health care in Canada without a robust health care IT infrastructure and the current group simply is not getting it done.

As mentioned, I will put some more though into how, in my opinion, health care can be transformed in the future. But for now, just know that whatever the numbers or promises being tossed around, the blunt reality is that it all amounts to trying to spend you way out of trouble.

When has that ever worked out well?

Ontario’s Heading For Another Family Doctor Shortage

This is the follow up blog to my last one, originally published in the Huffington Post on June 13, 2017. Reprinted here so that I can keep track of my old blogs, and also to once again point out how warnings of a crisis in Family Medicine were ignored for years.

The Barer-Stoddart report. Ask any physician of a certain age and the immediate reaction is likely to be disparaging. Written in 1991, it purported to help chart the course of the physician workforce into the 21st century. 

While it’s true that much of the report was ignored by the Ontario government of Bob “Super Elite” Rae, it’s still widely remembered for suggesting that the number of physicians in Ontario needed to be cut by 10 per cent. To accomplish this, medical school enrollment was slashed in the early 1990s.

Given that the population of Ontario continued to grow and age, the result was completely predictable. A massive doctor shortage (particularly in family medicine) hit the province at the end of the decade. It has taken the last 15 years to come close to correcting that. We’re not there yet (we still have fewer doctors per capita than Mongolia), but we were improving.

Alas, Ontario Health Minister “Unilateral Eric” Hoskins and Deputy Health Minister Bob Bellwere unable to remember the old saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Former Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins

Last week I blogged about how Hoskins and Bell need to support family medicine. Because they are not doing so, many physicians who graduate from family medicine residencies are not starting comprehensive family practices. Instead, they are doing things like hospitalist work, sports medicine and even medical marijuana clinics.

However, the situation is even worse than I thought. It was pointed out to me after my blog was published that the number of medical students applying to family medicine programs has dropped considerably this year. In Canada, to become a practicing physician, you first have to graduate from medical school, then do a residency (essentially a training program) in the specialty of your choice. To choose a residency, you apply to CARMs — which is a Canada-wide program that matches medical school graduates to the residency of their choice.

This year’s CARMs match shows some alarming results for family medicine in Ontario. Ideally, we should have 45 to 50 per cent of all graduates from medical school apply to family medicine for a sustainable workforce. However, only the Northern Ontario School of Medicine achieved that goal. While it’s a great school, it’s still the smallest of Ontario’s six medical schools.

By comparison, only 24 per cent of graduates of University of Toronto applied to family medicine, 27 per cent of Queen’s graduates, 32 per cent of Ottawa’s graduates, etc. Multiple studies show that comprehensive family medicine is responsible for decreased health-care costs, more efficient utilization of the health system, better patient outcomesand decreased hospitalizations. It is essential for a sustainable health-care system to have a strong family medicine component. The fact that so few medical school graduates chose family medicine, on top of the fact that recent graduates are not opening practices, should be setting off alarm bells.

So, why is this happening? First and foremost, it’s because Hoskins and Bell have refused to support family medicine. They have talked loudly about how they want to cut payments to higher paying specialties so that they could fund family medicine. Hoskins even went to the trouble of doctoring (pun intended) a chart to accuse specialists of overbilling. 

(Seriously, see the picture in this article. Notice how he made the pie chart on the right larger — the whole circle, not just the wedge showing percentage of billings. Makes the red area look LARGER than it really is, and makes the specialists look they are billing disproportionately more than they are.)

Unfortunately, while Hoskins and Bell were saying this in public, what they were actually doing is cutting family physicians. They unilaterally cut the number of physicians who could apply to the capitation (salary plus performance bonus) models of funding that I mentioned last week. This is the preferred method for paying physicians for newer graduates, and also for health care bureaucrats who like a predictable budget. Additionally, they cut a number of the performance bonuses family physicians got for looking after complex patients.

Medical students are not dumb. They saw all of this going on, and realized that family practice was no longer preferred by Hoskins and Bell. So they made career choices accordingly.

Currently, the Hoskins/Bell legacy is not a pretty one. It’s one of internecine disputes with doctors, laid-off nurses, hospital deficits, patients in stretchers for days and egregious wait times. At least with family medicine, they have an opportunity to begin to correct this mess by once again allowing new physicians to enter the capitation model, and restoring the various performance bonuses.

Failure to do so will mean that many years from now, as patients struggle to find a family physician, Hoskins and Bell will be remembered with the same disparaging legacy as Barer-Stoddart.

Hoskins and Bell Need to Support Family Medicine

The following is a reprint of an article that I wrote for the Huffington Post on June 5, 2017. Re-posting here so that we can see how the seeds of declining family physicians was planted by Drs. Eric Hoskins and Bob Bell, and also so that I can refer to it in the future if needed.

For the past 23 years, it’s been my pleasure to be a preceptor with the Rural Ontario Medical Program based out of Collingwood. As a preceptor, I have had the honour of supervising a wide variety of Medical Trainees, from first year Medical Students, all the way up to those in their last year of Residency. 

I often find I learn as much from them as they learn from me (it’s good to be questioned by students about why you do things the way you do). I clearly have some experience on my side, and they have more recent book knowledge. It’s a great combination for patient care.

Unfortunately, I can see that we are once again heading for the same situation as the late 1990s/early 2000s, when many medical trainees stopped going into comprehensive family medicine. The reasons then were due to increased workload, better opportunities in other specialties and an extremely poor relationship with the government of the day. 

At one point, only about 25% of graduates from medical school applied to Family Medicine Residencies. To suggest that there was a crisis in family medicine would be dramatically understating the issue.

However, the Conservative government of Mike Harris finally realized you need to co-operate with doctors if you want to improve patient care. In 2000, Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer rolled out something called Primary Care Reform (PCR) in co-operation with the Ontario Medical Association (OMA). This, over the next few years, led to a revitalization of Family Medicine, and now, close to 40% of medical school graduates are once again choosing Family Medicine as their specialty. 

While not the sole part of the PCR, a major component was a new model of paying physicians known as capitation. Capitation is essentially salary plus performance bonuses. Family Physicians would be paid a certain monthly rate to look after their patients, regardless of how often they saw them. They get bonuses based on how many complex (eg. Diabetic) medical cases they take on. This was in stark contrast to the old system known as Fee For Service (FFS) where physicians were essentially paid piecemeal (only got paid when they saw a patient).

The capitation based models were extremely popular with both Family Physicians and government. For Family Physicians, it allowed them to spend the time needed with patients during just one visit, instead of requiring multiple visits. For the government, it provided a predictable funding envelope. I appreciate this will come as a surprise to a couple of the frequent critics of my articles (in the comments), who have long implied that I was critical of Health Minister “Unilateral Eric” Hoskins because I was allegedly supporting the FFS model, but I actually have been in a capitated model since 2004.

UHN President and CEO Bob Bell

Drs. Bob Bell (left) and Eric Hoskins

Did PCR work? In 2001, the population of Ontario was 11.4 million, and almost 3 million people didn’t have a family doctor. In 2016, the population of Ontario was 13.9 million, and only 800,000 did not have a family doctor. So over 4.5 MILLION people got a family doctor.

Then along came the hapless “Unilateral Eric”, and his widely disliked sidekick, Deputy Minister Bob Bell. “Unilateral Eric” likes to claim that he himself is family doctor. The reality is that he has NEVER provided the cradle to grave care that comprehensive family doctors in Ontario do on an ongoing basis. He does work a day a month at a walk in clinic, and I understand he donates that income to charity – which is good of him, but it’s hardly the same as what comprehensive family doctors do. 

Bob Bell for his part, likes to boast about how he used to be a family doctor back in the 1970s, but he seems to be unable to grasp that family medicine might have evolved since then.

Acting with the same level of competence as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the infelicitous duo of Hoskins and Bell unilaterally cut the number of family physicians who could apply to capitated funding models. Again, this is likely a surprise to a couple of the critics of my columns, who have long been demanding that physicians go on salary. Surprise, it was Hoskins and Bell who unilaterally stopped the salary style models, not the OMA. They also unilaterally cut some of the performance bonuses (for things like diabetic care, medical education and so on).

The result was clearly predictable to anyone who understands Family Medicine in the 2010s. Over the past three years newer graduates from Family Medicine programs are avoiding comprehensive care. Many of my trainees are choosing to work solely in areas like emergency, anaesthesia, sports medicine or others. And while there is a need for doctors in all fields, the reality is that it’s comprehensive Family Medicine that leads to health system stability. 

It’s comprehensive Family Medicine that reduces hospitalizations. It’s comprehensive Family Medicine that when supported properly, reduces costs of health care.

In response to this, the dolorous duo of Hoskins and Bell unleashed something called the New Graduate Entry Program (NGEP) to provide new family medicine graduates with what they claimed was a capitated funding model. Alas they attached so many conditions including a morass of bureaucratic oversight that I understand only two new graduates have taken them up on this offer.

Hoskins and Bell have left a legacy of a crumbling health care system with their arroganceand unilateral cuts. 

However, they still have the ability, and opportunity to begin to correct one of their most egregious mistakes. A new crop of Family Medicine Residents will graduate on July 1. Hoskins and Bell can unilaterally reverse the cuts to the capitated models and performance bonuses. No one from the OMA will complain.

It’s time for them to recognize the important role of comprehensive Family Physicians, and support that with actions, not just words.

What Backlogged Health Care Looks Like and How to Fix It.

Dr. Silvy Mathew guest blogs for me today. She is hands down one of the smartest people I know. She writes about her experience in visiting the ER to help a family member. Dr. Mathew has been a strong advocate for health system reform and it is a loss for all Ontario residents that her warnings about the impending crisis in health care were not heeded by Health Ministers dating back to Eric Hoskins.

A few days ago I was in the Emergency Room (ER) with a family member. The ER was slammed. The paramedics were lovely and about four teams that I could see were stuck in waiting room, waiting for their patients to be triaged. We were on a stretcher by the front sliding doors. Almost outside.

We were there for urgent imaging, and possibly consultation. We tried to do this in the outpatient setting, but lack of access to both urgent images and consults for urgent care makes that impossible. So we go off to ER by EMS (needed for transport).

I’m fortunate. I am able to fill in gaps. I can advise triage what issue is, as they can’t do physical exam in the waiting room in front of what seems like hundreds of people. I can provide medical information on relevant questions. I can monitor the patient status for changes.

I did remind staff after several hours to check blood sugar as my relative is an insulin dependent diabetic, now off food/fluids. I did remind about necessary medications to be given. Of course, if I wasn’t there, they may have reviewed the chart closer but they were clearly slammed and trying to manage.

And we weren’t in distress. My family member was unable to advocate for themselves. We got imaging about six hours in, and I watched the imaging staff, working with 50% less nursing staff, literally just running in and out moving people. Doing their best.

We had excellent care from people busting their butts. But so many potential falls through the cracks and errors. Twelve hours later, we got home, luckily without any new issues from ER. And we had a plan. And we had a specialist who called first thing in the a.m. to ensure we have close follow-up.

The system in Ontario has relied for decades on individuals and work-arounds making things work (like above) when the system design is archaic. Successive Ontario governments have refused to participate in strategic multi-pronged co-design, instead of piecemeal band-aids.

I have worked for 15 yrs in Ontario health care. I’ve witnessed how far things have fallen and how none of our work arounds previously used are available now after the Covid 19 pandemic, for multiple reasons. I’ve participated with the Ontario Medical Association and sat on bilateral committees with the government to try to advocate for system change.

I’ve witnessed how siloed and unaware most people outside of primary care are. Family Medicine is the canary NOT the Emergency Department. The issues that have caused this system collapse have been occurring since 2012. Many of us, especially Dr. Nadia Alam, tried to be loud and warn.

Last year, in 2021, we gave up. It was obvious to us it was too late. We heard for years from our mid-career colleagues about how they couldn’t do this anymore. How they wouldn’t work in a system that didn’t allow them ANY joy or success while taking more and more from them personally.

Covid-19 just pushed the dial a bit faster. The family doctors who were hanging on from retiring have chosen to live now (not leave, but LIVE). The mid-career family docs are struggling as mentioned above and also choosing to leave family medicine if possible, because nothing is working in it. Obviously, new graduates are terrified.

And so here we are, and the CCFP answer to this is to ADD a third year to residency. Because somehow they think adding more school, asking people to take on more debt, delay starting their lives longer, while having less non-academic preceptor support will somehow help?

What it will do is: add even more fuel to the family medicine crisis and shortage. It’s not gonna teach you how to run a business (last I checked real life experience mattered more). It’s not going to teach how to manage complexity in real life. It WILL drive more people out of family medicine residency.

What we REALLY need is a re design of the health system. You want people to do this job? LET them. You want family doctors to work at the top of their scope? ENABLE them. Support access to resources OUTSIDE of hospital and provide help to coordinate.

Stop advocating for more debt and school CCFP, and advocate for real life mentorship, group practices and shared care. You want Emergency Rooms to not house people? Fund home care and long term care. Fund resource teams to support those in seniors neighborhoods already. Use a community approach.

While we are at it, stop spending all the money on pharmacology. Fund allied health, encourage exercise programs and healthy meals because that’s WAY more useful than the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Botox we spend on contractures AFTER they occur. Keeping people mobile keeps them out of hospital and long term care.

The Canadian media can stop asking if health care has collapsed, anyone working in it knows it has. It will show in a year or two, when the numbers of late-diagnosed cancers, life expectancy and other markers of care get affected. But in real-time we are seeing it now.

If we don’t have some real leadership here and some true innovation, we are in for some truly sad times in the next decade. End.

All Ontarians Should Hope New Health Minister Sylvia Jones Succeeds

New Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones

Sylvia Jones is now Ontario’s Minister of Health, the largest, most volatile ministry in government. The Ontario Medical Association’s (OMA) correctly tweeted about this:

My first thought when I saw this was a somewhat flippant “should have sent her condolences instead.” Minister Jones has a whole lot of headaches going forward. To succeed, she pretty well needs to be perfect. A cursory glance at the issues she faces is mind boggling.

Should she support further lifting of Covid-19 restrictions? This will make some doctors mad. Should she instead support re-introducing mask mandates and tightening of Covid-19 policies? This will make other doctors angry. Worse, both sides have credible experts, so the whole “listen to the experts”can’t apply when the experts themselves are saying different things.

There is a Health Human Resources crisis unfolding in Ontario (and Canada). Hospital ERs are being closed due to staffing crises and there does not seem to be a quick solution. As more health care workers plan on retiring or leaving the profession early, finding replacements is going to be exceptionally challenging.

The Long Term Care (LTC) situation is equally dire. Wait times for LTC beds in Ontario are skyrocketing. In 2017 I wrote about how we needed 26,000 hospital beds right away, and another 50,000 by 2023. More beds are being built by the Ford government, which is great, but they will take time to arrive.

A quick solution to ease the burden would be to allow older homes who had ward beds in their facilities, open them up again. Rules were changed under covid to no longer allow 4 residents per room. However, if you do that, people will scream you are committing gerontocide. (This is despite the fact that just about all residents in nursing homes have got four covid shots now).

Need more? (As if that wasn’t enough). Over 20 million medical procedures were delayed due to the pandemic. Many of these procedures are early detection screening tests for cancer (sooner you catch, the sooner you cure and, cold-heartedly, the less cost to the health care system).

How about wait times? Wait times for medically necessary procedures continues to rise. MOH bureaucrats like to refer to these as “elective” procedures. But the reality is that if you are suffering from knee pain every day, and have to wait a year to get a knee replacement, it’s not elective, it’s necessary.

All of which makes me realize just how courageous Minister Jones is to take on the Health Portfolio. Allah/God/Yahweh/(insert deity of your choice) knows I wouldn’t want the job. But if I may, I would suggest the Minister should focus on a few things in the first year, as even improvements in a couple of areas will have benefits across the health system.

A word of caution first. She should take what bureaucrats tell her with a grain of salt. There were a few times when I was on the OMA Board when it became obvious that the MOH Bureaucrats had NOT fully informed then Health Minister Christine Elliot about some issues around physicians that caused needless kerfuffles. The bureaucracy has a certain way of thinking that is rigid, ideological and focussed on self perpetuation as opposed to making meaningful change.

I don’t always agree with columnist Brian Lilley of PostMedia, but he hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

“…Ford and his team shouldn’t rely on the Ministry of Health for solutions. These are the people who got us into this mess and who have been failing upward for years..”

and

“..Ford has a real opportunity to change health-care delivery, to speed up access to services, to do away with wait lists and all without changing the single-payer system that Canadians rely on..”

The last comment lines up nicely with the first part of the OMA’s Prescription for Ontario, where they recommend developing outpatient surgical clinics to move simple operations out of hospitals and free up beds. The bureaucracy will oppose it because they are incapable of new ways of thinking and are beholden to hospitals. But at least the Minister will have the support of Ontario’s doctors to work through some of the blowback (there’s always blowback to anything new).

The other easy win is to develop a digitally connected team of health care providers for each patient (also an OMA recommendation). We have something similar in the Georgian Bay Region for the past 12 years and I cannot stress how much it has improved patient care. If I have a patient in need of increased home care, all I have to do is message the home care co-ordinator directly from their chart and ask for help, and they usually respond within 24 hours among other benefits.

This also ties in with a project I was pushing hard for during my term on the OMA Board that got sidetracked mostly by the pandemic but also with some political issues around OntarioMD. I remain convinced that had that project gone forward there would be people alive today that aren’t because of the improved communication it would have provided. But at least preliminary work on it has been done, and with a nudge from the Health Minister this could potentially be restarted to give patients a digitally connected health care team.

NB- this is another area where the Digital Health Team at the Ministry of Health is going in the wrong direction. Their plans are (in my opinion) needlessly complex and won’t result in the kind of robust digital health infrastructure that is absolutely essential to a high performing health care system.

In short, Minister Jones has a monumental task ahead of her. Someone will will criticize her no matter what choices she makes (it’s no secret that health care is referred to as the third rail of politics). If however, she can set, say, three attainable goals in her first year (my suggestions would be open LTC beds, start building outpatient surgery clinics and get the digital infrastructure done), while keeping the bureaucrats in check, then real progress can be made in improving the health system.

All Ontarians, regardless of political stripe, should hope she succeeds. Our crumbling health system depends on it.