The agreement concluded between the Minister of Health Christian Dubé and medical specialists allows him to take a key step in his reform. It now remains to be seen whether he will have enough time to complete the study of Bill 15 before Christmas without resorting to a gag order.
The agreement in principle should “allow better access for patients to consultations with specialist doctors across Quebec,” announced the minister and the Federation of Specialist Physicians of Quebec (FMSQ) in a joint press release on Thursday.
It does not provide for any expense or financial compensation, indicate the two parties.
With this agreement, the government wants to ensure that all specialist doctors devote part of their time to seeing patients in hospital. Some of them only work in clinics and the minister wanted them all to help reduce waiting lists. In the jargon, we call this special medical activities (AMP).
Bill 15 imposed this change on doctors, which the agreement allows us to avoid, we learned The duty.
Thus, Minister Dubé should make amendments to the MPA bill next week since he achieved his goals otherwise.
In recent months, the FMSQ has been very critical on this subject, criticizing Christian Dubé for wanting to impose “wall to wall” solutions for all regions and specialties.
The agreement, the contents of which have not been made public, is the culmination of months of negotiations between the two parties. This is also only a first step since its impact on each medical specialty remains to be “determined”, specifies the press release.
The study of the bill is halfway through its 1,180 articles and there are only 13 days left in the parliamentary session before the holiday adjournment.
However, if he wants to create the Santé Québec agency in the spring as he planned, the minister must necessarily have the bill adopted by December.
Will he use a gag order to achieve his goals? On Thursday, his office still said it was “confident” of being able to do it without it. His press secretary points out that a large number of articles are “concordance” measures of a technical nature which can be adopted quickly.
More details will follow.