CMA vows to address member drain

Since 1867, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) has had an enviable reputation as a national advocacy organization speaking for Canada’s doctors and advocating for better healthcare.And with the sale of its financial services subsidiary in 2018 for $2.6 billion the CMA also has a rock-solid financial footing enabling it to provide millions for worthy healthcare related innovations supporting the priorities of the association.But for a variety in reasons including some deliberate decisions, in the process of fundamentally reinventing itself, the association lost touch with many of its members and has led many to question whether it can legitimately call itself the voice of the Canadian medical profession. The current membership of the CMA now stands at 35,663, less than half what it was just a few years ago.This year’s virtual annual general meeting of the association saw CMA leaders explicitly address this issue. In fact, the agenda of the meeting was adjusted to allow the CMA board of directors’ chair Dr. Suzanne Strasberg to detail specifically what steps the association was taking to improve the situationIn addition, bylaw changes adopted at the meeting will allow the association to move away from an annual membership model and further reduce membership dues for many while reducing the paperwork involved.Read: Pat Rich: Trump trumping everything—even healthcareAt the meeting, CEO Alex Munter first raised the issue of declining membership noting it was “less than it has been in previous times.”“We acknowledge the decline in CMA membership,” said Dr. Strasberg. “The CMA membership value proposition has eroded significantly over time and must be re-imagined.”Munter explicitly described some of the factors that have contributed to declining membership, with Dr. Strasberg saying some of this was due to “strategic choices we’ve made” while other reasons “are issues outside of our control.”Looming large as one of those strategic choices has been the recent focus of the CMA on core strategic issues deemed to be of fundamental importance to physicians such as improving physician well-being and reducing administrative workload. This focus has come at the expense of benefits offered to individual members such as a suite of clinical tools and leadership resources. Others point to a relatively recent underlying shift by the association in its mission statement to put the health and wellbeing of patients and the healthcare system ahead of advocacy for individual physicians.The very move that has put the CMA on such a strong financial footing—the sale of MD Financial—can also been seen as a cause of membership decline as access to the financial resources offered by MD was seen by many members as the main—if not the only—reason for joining the CMA.Changes in the relationship between the CMA and provincial/territorial medical associations (PTMAs) have also played a large part in the membership decline. Beginning in the 1930s, membership in the CMA was tied to membership in most of these PTMAs who negotiate fees for their members. In recent years, the PTMAs have broken this link which means physicians no longer had to join the CMA when they paid dues to their PTMA. The situation is even more dire in Quebec, where a local CMA division no longer exists.Outside the control of the CMA has been the existential crisis facing all member-based associations in recent years as individuals no longer feel obliged to be joiners and seek very explicit benefits to be persuaded to hand over their membership dues. To its credit the CMA leadership recognized this trend more than a decade ago and it may explain in part some of the fundamental reorganization the association underwent.In order to address the issue of membership decline, Dr. Strasberg said the CMA board established a membership working group to review the CMA membership strategy and model “in the context of what it means for CMA to be the voice of Canada’s physicians today and into the future.” She said this group “believes it is critical that an updated membership value proposition be strategically aligned and sustainable over time.”Representing the doctors of Canada has been a shifting landscape over the past century with the current relationship between the CMA and individual doctors, PTMAs, and the healthcare system as a whole being just the most recent chapter.Stay tuned for future developments.Pat Rich is a Canadian health journalist and former editor of the Medical Post. This item originally appeared on his blog site.

CMA vows to address member drain

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics

Business Topic