Queen’s Park Day 2023 - Physician Perspectives

I think the first thing we have to address is the primary care crisis. You cannot ignore that. But to address the primary care crisis, you have to also address the administrative burden. People are not going to want to go into primary care if there are all of these other aspects that are taking them away from it and making it unsustainable. As a specialist, I need primary care. I need to have patients who have a primary care team to look after them. To have a family physician who knows them and who understands all the different aspects of their care versus I might be only seeing them in one particular area. We all need to work together. But the bedrock of our medical system really is primary care.

Unless we can find ways to keep physicians in practice, we won't have the health-care system that we need. We need to figure out ways to take the burden off family physicians and take away some of the administrative burden. This would help them to focus their efforts on the patients they care about and provide them the supports and the resources to be able to provide the care they want.

If we can do things to get rid of some of that paperwork, if we can incorporate AI to do a lot of our dictating, our notetaking, that allows me to talk face-to-face with my patients. Looking at them eye-to-eye, connecting, as opposed to being on my computer. If I don't do this in front of my patient, I'm doing it after work. Research shows we do over 19 hours of administrative work a week as physicians. So, if I can just be talking human to human, that’ll bring the joy back to the practice of medicine, the humanity of medicine.

All of them are equally important. We do have a crisis in primary care. All of the solutions that are geared towards primary care and increasing capacity are important.

I think the home-care issue is huge. There has to be a transfer of funds for staff to be hired, to provide care services at home or close to home. The way things are now in our area, it's non-existent. People have to actually drive to a clinic. Not everyone is able to drive themselves, so that would mean having a family member. And if you have had surgery, you may not be in any shape to go and do this. So, we really need to offer services in home when it's appropriate.

I do think team-based care will help to bring other allied health professionals into the system in a structured fashion. So not haphazard, but in a structured way where they can work as a team alongside physicians. We'd hopefully have pharmacists, physiotherapists, social workers all working together. I think that would really be something we can hopefully provide fairly quickly and immediately. It would really improve the quality of care for patients, and it would improve the quality of life for our family doctor colleagues. I think that would then translate into better referral patterns for specialists.

Consultation with specialists is very important for emergency room doctors and for family doctors. We really need to have it centralized and harmonized. I only know two doctors to send pediatric head and neck problems to, but there are many more than two. We need a centralized online system to co-ordinate our efforts so that our patients can get to the most qualified specialist, in the shortest amount of time.