In a recent article from Duty, Marie-Eve Cousineau presented the results of the report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business according to which Quebec physicians spend 4.4 million hours a year on administrative tasks that do not require their clinical expertise or that are downright useless . Better used, these hours would allow Quebec physicians to provide 13.2 million additional consultations annually.
It is enormous. Knowing that between one and two million additional consultations per year would make it possible to unclog emergency rooms in Quebec, how is it that after so many years, the problem is not already solved? The methodology and the conclusions of this study deserve to be validated by the specialists of the Legault government responsible for the negotiation with the doctors.
Now, it is possible for forms currently filled out by doctors to be simplified or abolished altogether, and even if the government and several organizations are already working in this direction, there is probably still room for simplification.
However, we must be wary of the intellectual shortcut according to which the hour saved by no longer filling out a form will automatically translate into the hour of consultation on the front line necessary to unclog the emergency room. The doctor is master of his time, and he might have other plans.
[…] The doctor is an independent worker, and it is not the president of his union, nor the Minister of Health, nor the President of the Treasury Board who can really interfere in the exercise of his choices. At best, they can try with financial incentives to influence it, but in this regard, the failures of the past are not very encouraging for the future. Less paperwork for more frontline services, the match seems obvious and the logic implacable, but between theory and reality, there is a whole world.
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