Ontario’s health-care system has been desperately in need of an update for decades. Now, despite griping by the usual suspects, it is finally happening.
Just over a week ago, the application process for new MRI and CT scan clinics closed. These new clinics, once approved, will be up and running in the new year, providing faster access to diagnostic testing.
The government was expecting 200 applications by deadline.
By the end of August, the government will be issuing a call for applications to establish new clinics to provide gastrointestinal and endoscopy clinics. Already, one source at the health ministry has said they have had 400 expressions of interest.
The big move, though, will come by the end of the year as the Ford government looks to beginning the process to establish community clinics for orthopaedic operations – essentially hip and knee replacement – by the end of 2024.
It’s been a long process to get here — some would say too long — but so far, the government has been making changes at a pace the public is comfortable with.
These coming changes are on top of the expansion of cataract surgery with new clinics licensed in Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa. In the first year of that expansion, 32,000 people were able to get cataract surgery rather than sitting on a waiting list under the old status quo.
The eye program will soon be expanded, meaning faster access to care for patients and smaller waiting lists. Now imagine expanding that to diagnostic testing, GI surgeries and hip and knee replacements.
Everyone has a story about waiting lists; we’ve all heard about them for years. It’s just that most governments have been afraid to do the work.
Organizations like the Ontario Hospital Association, the Ontario Medical Association and the various nurses’ unions and organizations are powerful lobby groups.
Yet, these changes are moving forward without major complaints from the people who know how the system operates. True, the NDP and Liberal opposition parties are ready and eager to complain. They even claim falsely that patients will be paying for services with their credit cards, but that message doesn’t seem to be resonating based on the polls.
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It’s not just the move to shift surgeries and testing out of hospitals to faster and cheaper solutions that shows the full extent of Ford’s health-care reform.
Starting last January, the Ford government allowed pharmacists to treat common ailments like pink eye or urinary tract infections. These are types of illnesses that people who experience them deal with again and again — they don’t need a new visit to the doctor for each instance.
Ontario was behind other provinces in allowing pharmacists to do this work, but it has taken off and cleared up a lot of family doctors’ waiting rooms in the meantime. When Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced a push to allow pharmacists to expand their assessment and treatment ability, she noted that more than 1 million patients had used this program since it started 18 months earlier.
“Our government is continuing to expand our bold and innovative plan to make it easier for people to connect to the care they need, close to home,” Jones said in July.
That’s the way it should be, making access to care easy for patients, not bogged down in some bureaucratic process that no longer makes sense.
On that front, the government is reducing the paperwork burden for family doctors by upgrading the system. The government says the changes will eventually save doctors 95,000 hours per year, meaning more time with patients.
That’s like adding 50 new GPs to the system.
The government also announced earlier this year that they will allow midwives to prescribe and administer more medications.
The health-care system still needs more attention; it is still bursting at the seams. But these changes – the most comprehensive in decades – will dramatically improve patients’ access to care.
That’s a good thing.