As the next election campaign begins in a few days, all parties should keep in mind that some promises are easier to keep than others, in health.
Posted yesterday at 5:00 a.m.
Like offering free parking at the hospital for the first two hours. Thing promised, thing due: in 2020, the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) fulfilled this commitment from the last election campaign. Checked. We move on to another file.
But on many other aspects, we are very far from the mark, which feeds the cynicism of the population.
For example, the CAQ made a commitment in the last elections to provide a family doctor to all Quebecers.
When she came to power, she paid $1 billion in incentives to encourage doctors to see more patients. A whole pot! Despite everything, the number of Quebecers waiting for a family doctor has jumped from 428,023 in 2018 to 829,956 today.
It’s totally double! And we cannot put all this increase on the back of the pandemic.
What’s worse is that these figures mask part of the problem, because many patients who have a family doctor cannot get an appointment. At the slightest glitch, they have no choice but to hang around in emergencies overwhelmed by visits of little or no urgency, which represent 54% of total visits.
Otherwise, they show up at walk-in clinics. And there, some are told: only one sore per person! Patients who want to take advantage of the consultation to talk to the doctor about another health problem are told that they have to make another appointment, Radio-Canada reported in early August.
It’s ridiculous ! It is good practice to optimize consultations to solve several problems at the same time, especially since these problems can be interrelated.
Despite everything, we must recognize that the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, is moving in the right direction.
As part of his very first election promise, on Wednesday, he pledged to create a new agency to oversee the operations of the health network, in order to allow the ministry to focus on orientations.
This separation of roles, which proved its worth during the vaccination campaign, should help bring order to the organization chart of the health system, which resembles a tower of Babel.
Last May, the Minister had also concluded an agreement with family physicians aimed at the management of 500,000 patients by a family medicine group (GMF) by March 31, 2023.
Apparently, the recipe works. Already, 288,000 Quebecers have been registered with a GMF, more than the intermediate objective of 250,000 at the end of July. It remains to be seen whether these patients will be able to see an expert within 36 hours.
Some will say that this is a way of lowering the bar on the sly, seeing that the initial promise would not be fulfilled before the election. They are not wrong.
No, orphan patients are no longer promised that they will be followed by a particular doctor, but rather by a group that has an interdisciplinary team to support it.
Except that if we want to solve the problems of the network, we have to get out of the old paradigms and put all the experts to good use.
A good example: by increasing the presence of physiotherapists in emergencies, we could reduce the burden of emergency physicians, since a quarter of consultations are related to musculoskeletal problems such as a sprain or a fracture, according to a study conducted at the CHU de Québec.
Less waiting, more satisfaction. The patients are happy. And doctors can focus on cases that only they can fix.
These are the kinds of constructive ideas we would like to hear about during the next campaign. We want down-to-earth, rather than being promised the moon.