ICYMI: Opinion: Doctors' moral injury shows need to change Sask. health care
The pandemic has raised doubts about my role as a physician and the structure of health-care funding and delivery in Canada.
I am deeply attached to the values embedded in Canada’s universal publicly funded medicare system. From an early age, I learned the lessons of justice and equity from my father, an adviser to the Royal Commission on Health Services in 1962-64, which recommended the implementation of medicare for all Canadians.
On the one hand, early in the pandemic Saskatchewan’s government implemented funding contracts for doctors who work in hospitals, so that doctors were free to give patients the time and attention they needed in their fight to survive COVID-19. This left Saskatchewan, especially smaller rural communities, without the resources to prevent hospitalization, and we saw increasing numbers of very sick non-COVID patients coming to Regina’s hospitals through the emergency room with diabetes out of control, uncontrolled high blood pressure, poorly controlled congestive heart failure and metastatic cancers.
We attended weekly continuing medical education courses on COVID treatment, and used up-to-date protocols to provide excellent care to all patients. We designed programs to use open beds in rural communities and transferred patients by ambulance to and from these rural sites. In Saskatchewan, the COVID-19 pandemic brought our system to the edge of collapse. The effect on physicians has been a growing resentment about carrying an outsized share of the health-care load, as evidenced by theOur physician workforce is discouraged and Saskatchewan has a growing reputation as a dysfunctional place to practise medicine. This makes it difficult to recruit newly minted family physicians who just want to practise medicine rather than running a business.
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