(Quebec) The Legault government on Thursday tabled its bill “aimed at increasing the supply of primary care services by general practitioners and improving supply management”. General practitioners will be required to take care of patients registered on the waiting list of the government access counter. The legislative piece also allows the RAMQ to transmit to health establishments the data necessary “for the planning of medical manpower”.
The Minister of Health and Social Services, Christian Dubé, tabled Bill (PL) 11 at the Salon Bleu, which aims to increase access to general practitioners. At least 800,000 Quebecers do not have family doctors.
The PL11 seeks to better supervise the care of doctors. In particular, it provides that physicians must add to their clientele only patients duly registered with the access point to a family doctor. Doctors must also make themselves available for patients insured by the RAMQ.
The government could also, by regulation, “provide for the cases and conditions under which a physician may add a clientele” and “determine the extent to which a physician must make himself available”.
The legislative piece also provides that the government, still by regulation, will be able to “determine the percentage of the time slots of availability of a doctor which must be offered from Monday to Friday, before 8 a.m. and after 7 p.m., as well as on Saturdays and Sunday ”, it is written.
Bill 11 will allow the RAMQ to be authorized to communicate to a health establishment “certain information necessary for the planning of physician resources”. The Régie may also communicate directly to the Minister of Health “the information necessary for the exercise” of its functions.
This measure echoes the words of the Prime Minister, François Legault, who maintained that he was ready to table a bill to allow Christian Dubé to communicate to the CEOs of the CISSS and the CIUSSS the names of the doctors who do not follow the less than 1000 patients.
Before the College of Physicians, Minister Dubé also stressed the importance that general practitioners and the government have access to the same data to better identify access problems.
The bill does not mention the imposition of penalties for physicians who fail to take care of patients. Tuesday, Mr. Dubé had said that his bill would be “a hand extended to physicians” general practitioners with whom he still wishes to negotiate an agreement.
“Agreements more than sanctions”, say the oppositions
“In principle, it takes agreements more than sanctions. The agreements are excessively important, ”Liberal MP Marc Tanguay said on Wednesday. The day before, the liberal leader, Dominique Anglade, had broken with the Barrette technique, stating in particular that law 20 “no longer applies in the current context”.
This law 20, adopted under the Couillard government, provided for financial penalties for physicians who did not take a minimum number of patients, but these penalties were never applied.
According to Marc Tanguay, the tabling of a bill “is not contradictory” with the search for a negotiated agreement with doctors.
For the Parti Québécois, Quebec did not leave enough room for negotiation with family doctors. “The government, faced with a complex problem, chooses the simplest and most coercive method, that of the bill,” lamented the parliamentary leader, Joël Arseneau.
According to him, Quebec thus takes “a risky bet” and going there of “the execution of its threat brandished during the inaugural speech of Prime Minister Legault.
Québec solidaire argued that the Legault government “has recently accustomed us to [au] stick, stick, stick ”.
“I hope that his bill will be part of a plan that will make it possible to solve the problem” of access to family doctors, commented the co-spokesperson Manon Massé, in the press scrum.
The leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, said he does not believe “that the solution of forcing doctors to work more hours is necessarily going to be the right one” to increase access.