Innovation injection a bold, potentially effective treatment for ailing health system

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2023 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was profoundly telling that when the new NDP government decided recently to disband the surgical and diagnostic recovery task force, almost no one mourned its passing.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara denounced the task force as a costly and opaque experiment by the former Progressive Conservative government that accomplished very little.

The members of the task force went into hiding. Even Kathleen Cook, the PC health critic, could not bring herself to directly criticize the decision to abandon the task force.

Cook did criticize the NDP for not announcing some new body or task force to replace the old one. But she didn’t say it should have been left in place.

The task force, arguably, started out as a good idea, one that was already being used in other provinces struggling to deal with surgical and diagnostic backlogs created by the pandemic. However, rather than a transparent and empowered group seizing new ideas and putting them into practice, we got a bloated entity moving at a glacial pace.

This view of the task force was reinforced this week when Asagwara revealed the task force spent $5.1 million on salaries in fiscal year 2022-23, and was on pace to spend about $6.5 million in the current year.

What did Manitobans get for all that money? The Tories have consistently claimed 85,000 Manitobans got expedited care via initiatives introduced by the task force. However, that claim is part of an array of flawed metrics the Tories rolled out in the months prior to the October election in a desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful, bid to show they had mastered the backlogs.

Did some Manitobans get expedited treatment? Undoubtedly, but those who benefited the most were sent out of the province for care. And that was neither a long-term solution nor the systemic change that is needed to reduce backlogs.

The task force departs with the knowledge the wait time from reference to a specialist to procedure is often still measured in years, not months.

What was missing from the task force, and from the delivery of health care, in general, in this province, was genuine innovation. New ideas that allow us to do more procedures, with better outcomes, without enormous hikes in funding.

There are many voices within health care that think there are ideas that would qualify under the criteria of new, more and better outcomes. But for a great many reasons, going back over many different governments, these ideas never seemed to get the green light.

There is no better example of this province’s unwillingness to embrace new ideas than the Virtual Emergency Care and Transfer Resource Service (VECTRS), a major innovation that moves patients — largely from remote and rural areas — between health-care facilities and medical specialists in a more streamlined and efficient manner.

VECTRS was unveiled by former Tory health minister Audrey Gordon almost one year ago exactly. And while the PC government gets top marks for moving ahead with the service, it should be noted that it took 12 years for the idea to get approved.

The health-care system in Manitoba, and in other provinces, has become extremely risk-averse. Partly because of the enormous costs of care, and partly because government doesn’t trust medical professionals, innovation has consistently been sacrificed to political expediency.

The problem is that you won’t make meaningful progress if you funnel all new ideas through a bottleneck, overseen by political gatekeepers. That is not just the failing of the former PC government; it’s a collective failure of decades of political oversight of health care, in just about every province in the country.

That bottleneck was in full view here during the pandemic.

For example, despite pleas from doctors, Manitoba was among the last provinces to approve virtual medical appointments. And even when they did give the green light, the Tories limited the types of things that could be addressed.

Government didn’t provide a clear explanation for that decision, but it was easy to see the political and bureaucratic levels felt it was just too much change, too quickly.

The same goes for a national campaign to reduce physician paperwork. A report earlier this year estimated that physicians across Canada spend more than 18.5 million hours on largely unnecessary paperwork and administrative duties, a block of time equal to 55.6 million patient visits. In Manitoba, the report found physicians spent 591,000 hours on redundant or purposeless paperwork, equal to an additional 1.8 million patient visits.

Doctors Manitoba pressed the PCs during the pandemic to take steps right away to address that problem. The advocacy group even presented government with a plan to streamline administration.

We’re still waiting for government — any government — to address the problem.

We don’t need more task forces. What Manitoba really needs is a new culture within government and the health-care system to embrace innovation quickly without fear of failure, measure the outcomes and fine-tune things to get the best results.

The task force is gone. It’s now up to the new government to show that it has the courage to replace it with the spirit of innovation.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com