Q-and-A with André Picard

Globe and Mail columnist André Picard was awarded honorary membership to the Ontario Medical Association at the 100th Awards in recognition of his reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of health-care coverage. Picard’s accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on us locally, provincially and globally provided a voice of transparency, uncovering gaps and promoting the cause of a sustainable health-care system. Unable to speak to doctors at the awards because it was a virtual event, Picard shared his thoughts later in a Q-and-A with the Ontario Medical Review.   

Here’s what he said:   

What’s it been like for you covering the worst public health crisis of our generation?  

Picard: COVID has really been for journalists the story of a lifetime. It’s really interesting, it’s professionally rewarding but it can also be personally difficult. It’s demanding for journalists but not in the same way as it is for others, for essential workers like health-care professionals. Everybody has different kinds of demands during the pandemic. I was thinking the other day, I had an uncle who during the Second World War reported from the frontlines. He wasn’t a journalist; he was essentially a propagandist for the army. He always said, “I was happy to be carrying a typewriter instead of a gun.” And he would always add, “then I was really happy that there were other people with guns in front of me.” And that’s how I feel as a journalist. We’re up there, but there’s all these other people doing way more important work in front of us and we’re grateful for it.   

What would you like to say to Ontario’s doctors?  

Picard: I’m really honoured to get this honorary membership in the Ontario Medical Association. It’s a very touching recognition. If I got the opportunity to speak, we can’t do any of this stuff during COVID, I would have talked about how the pandemic has really exposed what doctors really do – beyond the fixing people. I always come back to this famous quote from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He said the first task of the doctor is political; the struggle against disease must begin with the war against bad policy. To me, that’s one of the most striking things during the pandemic, especially in Ontario. We’ve seen some horribly bad policy inflicted on Ontarians by the government and the only people there on the frontlines helping them out were the doctors, using their voice really powerfully to rail against bad policy. To me, that was really important. It was medicine at its finest. It saves lives as much as the hands-on medicine does every day.   

What would you like to say to Ontarians?   

Picard: I think citizens, Ontarians in general, have responded to this pandemic really well. People have really come together. Most people have put aside their personal interests and acted in the benefit of the collectivity. Everyone’s made sacrifices big and small. It’s impressive and I think it helped us have – we didn’t have a great pandemic – but it could have been much, much worse if people were much more like Americans, not to point fingers south, but just acting selfishly. You didn’t see a lot of that in Canada. I think that’s amazing. The other thing I really appreciated is that citizens and voters saw the benefits of science-informed policymaking and they embraced the science. They listened to physicians, to experts. Even when they didn’t like what they heard, they tended to listen to them, so that gives us hope. I hope they’ll appreciate going forward that medicine is something more than just what happens on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s not all about fixing boo boos and trauma and surgery. It’s about everyday stuff, making life better for citizens and making demands for better policy and so on. We all made sacrifices big and small, and they’ve paid off and I hope people recognize that it was worth it.  

The health-care system has transformed dramatically as a result of the pandemic. How has it changed for the better?  

Picard: There’s no question that the health-care system changed dramatically during the pandemic. Some of it good, some of it bad. Our hospitals did exceptionally well. I don’t think people recognize just how well we did. We had virtually no outbreaks in hospital. They never were overwhelmed, even with overwhelming numbers of ICU patients. It was unthinkable that we could have 850 people in ICU in the province and survive, and nobody died because of lack of care. That’s a tremendous accomplishment in itself. Another obvious one is that we embraced digital health. Telemedicine has really become the norm in the province and in the country over the last year. I hope we hang onto the good of it and recognize that there are limits to it – sometimes people have to be seen. I think we made at least 10 years of advance on telemedicine in a few months. The final one I’d say is that we’ve recognized the social determinants of health. That’s become part of our daily discussions in public policy and that’s great, this recognition that it’s not just about medicine. It’s about making sure people have a decent income and a roof over their heads etc., because we saw who suffered during the pandemic. It was frail elders, it was people living in homelessness, it was racialized workers. We need policies that address that. It’s not enough to do sickness care, we have to do health care.  

Globe and Mail health columnist André Picard received an OMA Honorary Membership in recognition of his reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of health-care coverage. (Image courtesy of the Canadian Medical Association).

What else needs to be done?      

Picard: I think the health system can always get better. There’s no question, we learned about some of the weaknesses; the most glaring one of course was in long-term care. We saw a horrible massacre of older people in institutional care. The way that hospitals did well, it really made how bad long-term care homes did look so much worse. We have to fix that. We have to remember our health system is not just hospitals, it’s beyond. That’s a really important one that we have to fix. We have to worry about the collateral damage of the pandemic. My greatest worry coming out of this is the mental health impact. This is collective trauma that’s been going on for a long time; for many, many months, and especially on frontline workers, on health-care workers. I worry we’re going to lose thousands upon thousands of personal support workers and nurses and physicians who are burned out and just can’t do it anymore. We have to pay attention to that human resource piece of the puzzle, the post-traumatic stress. I hope we don’t immediately go back to the so-called normal. A lot of people just want to forget this and move on, but I hope people really learn the lessons from this. Through the pandemic we learned we can do things better; we can do things differently. We made some tremendous advances during this pandemic just because we were forced to. I hope we hang onto them. I often say that a pandemic is a terrible thing to waste. Some good can come of this and we can’t allow it to be otherwise.   

Top image courtesy of John Kenny.