Don’t prolong physicians’ paperwork probe By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Feb. 10, 2023

Opinion

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This article was published 10/02/2023 (939 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Physicians are suffering from a surfeit of unnecessary paperwork, but it will be months before a task force decides how and when it will offer them a treatment.

It’s a scenario straight out of Yes, Minister, the 1980s British satirical sitcom that skewered both politics and bureaucracy alike.

But the paperwork problem in Manitoba’s health system is no laughing matter. Doctors would rather see it vanish, or at least lessen dramatically, rather than adding to a stack that grows taller with each patient they attend to.

The task force — which was formed Feb. 3 and will include three physicians as well as representatives from Manitoba Health and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) — will study the sticky symptoms of red tape. It has until the end of the year to devise a solution that frees physicians to treat more patients and fill out fewer forms.

Manitoba task force to target doctors’ paperwork burden

The sooner the better, because both the province’s physicians and the people they care for are suffering from paperwork’s side effects.

Filling out some forms for doctors is essential to the health-care system, whether it is to update a patient’s medical records or to correctly bill provincial governments for services rendered.

However, a portion of the paper-pushing is needless, and physicians know it, says Dr. Candace Bradshaw, president of Doctors Manitoba.

She says she no longer takes on new patients, partly owing to the “soul-sucking” paperwork, which she says takes up 10 to 12 hours of her work week and can lead to burnout.

“We did not go into medicine to do data entry,” she said in response to a CFIB study titled Patients Before Paperwork, which was released in January.

The CFIB report, which is based on the Nova Scotia findings, estimates the nation’s doctors spend 18 million hours a year on unnecessary paperwork.

The task force follows a study from Nova Scotia, the first of its kind in Canada to quantify a doctor’s administrative burden, which revealed about 14 per cent of a physician’s paperwork is unneeded and a further 24 per cent could be filled out by someone else.

The CFIB report, which is based on the Nova Scotia findings, estimates the nation’s doctors spend 18 million hours a year on unnecessary paperwork.

That works out to an average of 10 to 11 hours a week doctors could use to treat more patients or spend more time with the ones already in their practice.

The value of removing unnecessary bureaucratic tasks from doctors’ workloads is far greater than giving the province’s MDs a respite from red tape.

Removing hours of paperwork from a doctor’s duties could help ease Manitoba’s physician shortage, which Doctors Manitoba said in 2021 reached an all-time high.

The shortfall grew by 13 per cent in 2021, it revealed, adding that Manitoba requires 405 additional doctors to reach the national average of 246 physicians per 100,000 residents.

Reducing paperwork could also help the province’s health system scale the mountain of backlogged surgeries and tests that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That it will take a task force — one that will likely shuffle another stack of papers for Manitoba Health to file — in order to make recommendations is unfortunate, because doctors have already diagnosed the problem and can’t wait to perform a paperwork-ectomy.

The task force and its members should act with some urgency instead of leaving the problem to fester. A prompt diagnosis and treatment often leads to a healthier outcome; the alternative is death by a thousand paper cuts.