Category: Politics

Parents can try to control everything their children do, or let them run completely wild. Neither extreme works well.

Politicians can try to control everything in medicine, or let doctors run wild.

Just like parents, politicians tend towards one extreme or another. If we listen closely, most pundits assume doctors should be controlled.

How to Manage Doctors

I spend hours listening to healthcare opinionists: politicians, candidates running for office, administrators, consultants, bureaucrats, journalists, talk show hosts and concerned citizens. They all have different ideas on how to manage doctors. But none of them questions the need for management. Continue reading “Manage Doctors for Patient Benefit”

Most people are too polite to tell you what they think. Even when it feels like someone was courageously honest, they still held back their strongest opinions.

This week, several dozen doctors met just west of Toronto to tell the OMA what they thought. It was one of many meetings booked across the province. Dr. Virginia Walley, OMA President, handled the questions and feedback.

Most docs pulled their punches and were polite. Even so, they offered bitter medicine. Continue reading “Doctors Need a Champion”

Canadian healthcare stands paralyzed in a Robert Frost poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

– The Road Not Taken

Wooly-minded people pretend binary choices do not exist. They think we can choose both roads. Or they think one road will always be clearly wrong, as long as we use logic, facts and good will in choosing.

Doctors face two roads every day:

Do we do what’s best for the patient and prescribe an expensive treatment, or do we do what’s best for society and save the money for something else?

Until recently, doctors just prescribed what patients needed. Continue reading “Healthcare System vs Patients – Stewardship Part II”