This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
More than 150 doctors flocked to Queen's Park on the first day back following the summer break with a message for the Ford government: "We're in crisis."
"More than crisis, we're in health-care catastrophe right now," said Dr. Dominik Nowak, president of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), a group representing doctors across the province.
In describing why he thought the province's health system had reached the point of "catastrophe," Nowak, a family doctor practising at Women's College Hospital, spoke of someone he recently met who didn't have a family doctor and bounced around between emergency rooms and pharmacies before receiving a cancer diagnosis in the ER.
"It's really about how are we treating human beings in this province and that's why we're calling it a catastrophe, because ... stories like that, they're a catastrophe. They're heartbreaking, they're unacceptable for us," he said.
The OMA launched a "stop the crisis" advocacy campaign last week calling for the government to do more in family medicine, northern and rural health care, emergency department closures, surgical, specialist and diagnostic wait times, health workforce shortages and digital innovation.
Nowak said their mission on Monday was also about "optimism."
"How do we move this from catastrophe to a health-care system that we can be proud of again? And that's what we're here to talk about," he told The Trillium on Monday morning, adding that the group expected to meet with half of the elected officials at the Pink Palace, including Health Minister Sylvia Jones.
"There is a way out of the situation that we're in right now. There is a way out of the pain, of the frustration, of the waits, of the heartbreak that people are experiencing right now as they reach out to a health-care system that just isn't meeting their needs," Nowak said.
The government has said it's making progress, that nearly 90 per cent of Ontarians have a primary care provider and 12,500 doctors have been added since 2018.
"Ninety is great, and leading Canada is great, but I want to do better, and I know we can do better because we've already put the policies and procedures, the expansions in place," Jones told reporters at Queen's Park on Monday, the same day the government announced it was appointing former federal Liberal health minister and family physician Dr. Jane Philpott to lead a new primary care action team.
"We have launched the largest medical school education system expansion in 15 years while breaking barriers for internationally educated physicians through programs like Practice Ready Ontario, making historic investments to expand interprofessional primary care teams, connecting 330,000 more people to primary care, and taking action to tackle administrative burnout, freeing up 95,000 hours that family doctors can spend with their patients. Through our government’s 2024 budget, we are doing even more, investing half a billion dollars to connect 600,000 more people to primary care," Hannah Jensen, a spokesperson for Jones, said last week.
"They're steps," said Nowak of the government's actions. "I would like to see some more ambition from this government around health care."
One of the things the OMA is calling for is improved access to surgeries and diagnostics, saying access is "hampered due to staff shortages and the lack of a co-ordinated pathway to get to these vital services."
The group has said part of the solution is for the province to have a centralized referral system, which would allow better co-ordination of care among family doctors, specialists, hospitals and other care providers.
It's about political will, argued Nowak.
"Everyone will agree that we need to go there. Centralized referrals is a low-hanging fruit to get us to a better place, but we need the political will, and that's why we're at a point where we need this government to step up, show ambition, and ... lead us to a better place in our health-care system," he said.
Nowak gave the example of having to send five different referrals to several doctors over numerous months before one of his patients needing a time-sensitive specialist visit received care.
"Imagine a world where we have a centralized referral system ... where we could say what kind of specialist they need, what kind of test, and could they drive maybe up to 50 kilometres or not, maybe they rely on public transit, and then the system deals with that so it offloads pressure from docs," he said.
On this, Jensen, the minister's spokesperson, said the government is "championing innovation to help family doctors and other primary care providers spend more time with their patients and less time on paperwork" through its "Patients Before Paperwork (PB4P) Initiative."
One of the examples she gave was an e-referral system that allows doctors to electronically refer patients to specialty care, instead of by fax.
Dr. Adil Shamji, the provincial Liberals’ health critic and an emergency room doctor, said while the health system needs to move away from fax machines, it's a "very low bar towards moving towards a centralized referral system."
"To me what a centralized referral system is ... a consultation goes out from a physician and then is directed to the most appropriate provider and redirected without intervention by the family doctor to ensure that it gets to the right place, to a specialist who can see the patient in a timely manner," Shamji told The Trillium.
