All Ontarians should hope new health minister Sylvia Jones succeeds

Sylvia Jones is now Ontario’s Minister of Health, the largest, most volatile ministry in government. The Ontario Medical Association’s (OMA) correctly tweeted about this: “OntariosDoctors congratulates new Minister of Health @SylviaJonesMPP and look forward to working together. #Onhealth.”—Ontario Medical Association (@OntariosDoctors) June 24, 2022 My first thought when I saw this was a somewhat flippant “should have sent her condolences instead.” Jones has a whole lot of headaches going forward. To succeed, she pretty well needs to be perfect. A cursory glance at the issues she faces is mind boggling. Read: Dr. Sohail Gandhi: What role should nurse practitioners play in fixing healthcare? Should she support further lifting of COVID-19 restrictions? This will make some doctors mad. Should she instead support re-introducing mask mandates and tightening of COVID-19 policies? This will make other doctors angry. Worse, both sides have credible experts, so the whole “listen to the experts”can’t apply when the experts themselves are saying different things. There is a health human resources crisis unfolding in Ontario (and Canada). Hospital ERs are being closed due to staffing crises and there does not seem to be a quick solution. As more healthcare workers plan on retiring or leaving the profession early, finding replacements is going to be exceptionally challenging. The long-term care (LTC) situation is equally dire. Wait times for LTC beds in Ontario are skyrocketing. In 2017 I wrote about how we needed 26,000 hospital beds right away, and another 50,000 by 2023. More beds are being built by the Ford government, which is great, but they will take time to arrive. A quick solution to ease the burden would be to allow older homes who had ward beds in their facilities, to open them up again. Rules were changed under COVID to no longer allow four residents per room. However, if you do that, people will scream you are committing gerontocide. (This is despite the fact that just about all residents in nursing homes have got four COVID shots now). Need more? (As if that wasn’t enough). Over 20 million medical procedures were delayed due to the pandemic. Many of these procedures are early detection screening tests for cancer (sooner you catch, the sooner you cure and, cold-heartedly, the less cost to the healthcare system). How about wait times? Wait times for medically necessary procedures continues to rise. Ministry of health (MOH) bureaucrats like to refer to these as “elective” procedures. But the reality is that if you are suffering from knee pain every day, and have to wait a year to get a knee replacement, it’s not elective, it’s necessary. All of which makes me realize just how courageous Jones is to take on the health portfolio. Allah/God/Yahweh/(insert deity of your choice) knows I wouldn’t want the job. But if I may, I would suggest the minister should focus on a few things in the first year, as even improvements in a couple of areas will have benefits across the health system. A word of caution first. She should take what bureaucrats tell her with a grain of salt. There were a few times when I was on the OMA board when it became obvious that the MOH bureaucrats had not fully informed then Health Minister Christine Elliot about some issues around physicians that caused needless kerfuffles. The bureaucracy has a certain way of thinking that is rigid, ideological and focussed on self perpetuation as opposed to making meaningful change. I don’t always agree with columnist Brian Lilley of PostMedia, but he hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Ford and his team shouldn’t rely on the ministry of health for solutions. These are the people who got us into this mess and who have been failing upward for years...” And:“Ford has a real opportunity to change healthcare delivery, to speed up access to services, to do away with wait lists and all without changing the single-payer system that Canadians rely on.” The last comment lines up nicely with the first part of the OMA’s Prescription for Ontario, where they recommend developing outpatient surgical clinics to move simple operations out of hospitals and free up beds. The bureaucracy will oppose it because they are incapable of new ways of thinking and are beholden to hospitals. But at least the minister will have the support of Ontario’s doctors to work through some of the blowback (there’s always blowback to anything new). The other easy win is to develop a digitally connected team of health care providers for each patient (also an OMA recommendation). We have something similar in the Georgian Bay Region for the past 12 years and I cannot stress how much it has improved patient care. If I have a patient in need of increased home care, all I have to do is message the home care co-ordinator directly from their chart and ask for help, and they usually respond within 24 hours among other benefits. This also ties in with a project I was pushing hard for during my term on the OMA board that got sidetracked mostly by the pandemic but also with some political issues around OntarioMD. I remain convinced that had that project gone forward there would be people alive today that aren’t because of the improved communication it would have provided. But at least preliminary work on it has been done, and with a nudge from the health minister this could potentially be restarted to give patients a digitally connected health care team. Also: this is another area where the digital health team at the MOH is going in the wrong direction. Their plans are (in my opinion) needlessly complex and won’t result in the kind of robust digital health infrastructure that is absolutely essential to a high performing health care system. In short, Jones has a monumental task ahead of her. Someone will will criticize her no matter what choices she makes (it’s no secret that healthcare is referred to as the third rail of politics). If however, she can set, say, three attainable goals in her first year (my suggestions would be open LTC beds, start building outpatient surgery clinics and get the digital infrastructure done), while keeping the bureaucrats in check, then real progress can be made in improving the health system. All Ontarians, regardless of political stripe, should hope she succeeds. Our crumbling health system depends on it. Dr. Sohail Gandhi is a former president of the OMA and opinions are his and not necessarily the opinions of the OMA Board. This article is a reprint from his blog site: justanoldcountrydoctor.com.

All Ontarians should hope new health minister Sylvia Jones succeeds

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