Unnecessary paperwork stealing doctors’ time with patients, report says

Manitobans would have the equivalent of 326 more doctors providing care for them and their families if not for the endless paperwork that takes them away from patients, a recent report suggests.

The Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business studied the administrative red tape that tangles up doctors across the country.

Physicians advocacy organization Doctors Manitoba said the more than 3,000 licensed practitioners in the province spend 9.7 hours, or a total of 667,000 hours per year, on administrative tasks.

That’s down from 10.1 hours in 2023, but still higher than the national average of 9.1 hours per week.

Dr. Nichelle Desilets, president of Doctors Manitoba and a Neepawa physician, said the need to reduce red tape comes at a time when the province is already 246 doctors per capita short of the national average.

“Excessive paperwork and unnecessary administrative tasks continue to impact care by pulling doctors away from seeing more patients,” Desilets said Monday.

“(Reducing red tape) would not get rid of our physician shortage altogether, but it is an important part of improving access for patients and, furthermore, an important part of retaining physicians that we’ve worked really hard to recruit.”

Nationally, the report released Monday said Canadian physicians spend 20 million hours working on “unnecessary paperwork and administrative tasks” — the equivalent of 9,000 full-time doctors.

After a CFIB report in 2023 found doctors were burdened with unnecessary administrative duties, Manitoba’s previous Tory government set up a joint task force to tackle the problem. It found that not only were doctors spending 10.1 hours doing administrative work, they believed 44 per cent of it was unnecessary.

A year later, the CFIB praised the province for recommending an initial 10 per cent unnecessary-paperwork reduction target for doctors.

The current NDP government has said it is looking at introducing new legislation in the spring to reduce or eliminate sick notes. Doctors Manitoba has said Manitoba physicians currently write about 600,000 medical notes each year.

The province would have the simplest rules in Canada if it changed legislation to restrict employers from asking for a sick note unless employees were absent seven consecutive days or 10 workdays in a calendar year, Doctors Manitoba said.

Desilets said doctors have told her they spend too much time making specialist referrals and ordering diagnostic tests. Simplifying government, insurance and employer medical forms, eliminating sick notes, replacing fax machine use with more electronic records and using AI to help fill out patient charts would all help.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said work is being done on the doctors’ recommendations.

“We’re actually working on every single one of them,” Asagwara said.

“We have made real progress on the list. We know there’s much more work to do, but we are… focused to do what we can to make it easier for doctors to practise in this province.”

Brianna Solberg, the CFIB’s director of legislative affairs, said Manitoba should be commended for shaving off more than 75,000 hours of MD paperwork, but the province can still do more.

“That work has certainly made a difference, but the report shows much more work needs to be done,” Solberg said.

Doctors Manitoba spokesman Keir Johnson said cutting unnecessary administrative work could save each doctor one or more hours a day.

“This is, unfortunately, time patients and the public don’t often see, what physicians might do for a few minutes in between patient visits — when you’re in the waiting room waiting for them,” Johnson said.

“Or it might be work they take home and rush to do after they get their kids to bed before they go to bed themselves, but it is work that leads to burnout and work that ultimately means that patients end up waiting longer to get care.

“That’s really why it matters to Manitobans.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca