CMA chief tells docs to rehabilitate their reputation - New Canadian Media
Wayne Kondro
August 20, 2014
Canada’s doctors must develop and adopt measures of “meaningful accountability” if they’re to rehabilitate their increasingly tarnished reputation, outgoing Canadian Medical Association President Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti argued Tuesday.
“Fat cats” and “hobby docs” are terms that are increasingly applied to Canadian doctors, while their status as leaders in the health care system substantially declined in the public’s mind between 2003 and 2013, Francescutti said in his valedictory address to the CMA’s 147 annual general meeting.
“Patients, I guess, aren’t quite as happy with their doctors as they used to be,” Francescutti said, citing surveys which indicate that the public perception of physicians plummeted with regard to measures ranging from their availability to the quality of their performance.
With respect to compassion, for example, just 35 per cent of Canadians believed doctors were compassionate in a 2013 survey, as compared with 61 per cent in 2003.
“Never, ever, at least in the 30 years that I’ve been practicing medicine, have I felt that there’s a greater need to really stand up and look like the profession that we have the potential to be,” Francescutti said.
Francescutti added international comparisons of the performance of the Canadian health care system are equally unflattering to physicians. In a recent Commonwealth Fund report, Canada only ranked higher than the United States and only because Americans sink far more money into their system. Otherwise, “Canada would rank last.”
If the health care system was viewed as a patient, “I think our patient is kind of traumatized. What we have to do is step up and find ways to make our patient better.”
With respect to compassion, for example, just 35 per cent of Canadians believed doctors were compassionate in a 2013 survey, as compared with 61 per cent in 2003.
Francescutti also noted that a U.S. Institutes of Health report indicated there is in the neighbourhood of US$750-billion in waste within America’s $2.8-trillion health budget.
The same algorithm applied to Canada would suggest that there’s “at least $30-40-50 billion” in health care spending north of the 49th parallel that is “not being used efficiently,” he said.
“Quit pointing the blame at everyone else,” Francescutti told delegates.
Among the measures that physicians could adopt to improve the health care system are new accountability models, such as the Cleveland Clinic’s use of one-year contracts to pay physicians, to determine what approach might be suitable for Canada, Francescutti added.
In other developments Tuesday at the CMA’s 147th annual general meeting:
Re-published with permission.
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