This article originally appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of the Ontario Medical Review magazine.
Ontario’s doctors work in a highly complex environment that has changed significantly over the past decade. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this complexity and pace of change.
Many forces – both positive and negative – will shape how you practise medicine in the future. These include unprecedented pressure on government spending, advances in technology, the competing interests of allied health professionals and the proliferation of corporate health-care delivery. As importantly, these forces are underscored by one of the most massive shifts in consumer expectations of health care and health-care providers that we have ever witnessed.
That is the question members and staff have spent the last two years answering, as we worked to transform the OMA into a more agile, efficient, and effective association. We marked a major milestone on this transformation journey at the May Spring Meeting, which included the first annual general meeting and General Assembly orientation under the new structure.
As a 140-year-old association, the OMA needed to change or be left behind. Many organizations and companies no longer exist because they were unable to disrupt the status quo and position themselves to imagine and define a future state of success. You do not have to look far to find examples. Most of us are not renting movies from a video store anymore, hailing a cab or doing our banking in person at a financial institution. Defence can be part of our strategy, but, as in business, if all we focus on is reducing expenses and defending the status quo, we will not have a winning growth strategy. As we began the OMA’s transformation, members identified some key themes around the need for change. These included:
The new governance structure is designed to help us address these issues. More importantly, it will position us to meet future challenges that we may not yet fully understand or even foresee.
Under the new structure, decision-making authority has been clarified, with defined roles for the new board and the new General Assembly. A new, smaller and skills-based board is responsible for organizational oversight, while the new General Assembly leads outside-the-box thinking and drives and shapes health-care policy and doctors’ role in this shifting landscape. This new structure, with more clearly defined roles, will allow the board and General Assembly to do their jobs more effectively. The end result is a structure that supports the planning and co-ordination required to help you manage the changes and challenges you face – both today and tomorrow.
I am optimistic about the future of the OMA and excited about the ideas and initiatives that the new General Assembly will generate to support physician leadership. I believe it can be a body that represents Ontario’s physicians extraordinarily well and that brings strong leadership to health-care issues in Ontario. There will be bumps along the way. We won’t achieve perfection. But the new structure will empower Ontario’s doctors to drive and shape the future.
In closing, I want to thank the group that made our governance transformation possible, including the Governance Transformation Task Force 2020 led by Dr. Paul Hacker and our Ontario Medical Review guest editor Dr. Lisa Salamon, as well as the board, Council and staff at the OMA who worked countless hours to turn our desire for positive change into reality.
Allan O’Dette
OMA Chief Executive Officer