‘Disappointed:’ Dr. David Price on call to remove him as FMF keynote

Attacking doctors who are on the Ontario Ministry of Health’s fee negotiating team is wrong-headed, argues Dr. David Price, one of four physicians on the team.In a blog yesterday, Dr. Sohail Gandhi, a former president of the Ontario Medical Association, said that the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) should remove Dr. Price as a keynote speaker from its Family Medicine Forum (FMF) in November. “I view it as a slap in the face to family physicians, given his role on the Ontario government’s negotiations team,” he wrote.In an earlier blog—“CFPC blows it AGAIN. Insults all Ontario physicians”—Dr. Gandhi said that by choosing to continue on the ministry team, Dr. Price is effectively supporting the ministry’s position that a “3% raise is enough for all doctors.”The Ontario Union of Family Physicians is supporting his position and has released a petition calling for the CFPC to remove Dr. Price as a keynote for FMF. Read: B.C. to provide more funding for new medical school, founding dean appointedBut in an interview Monday night, Dr. Price said “it would be naive of physicians to think I go in there and I say, ‘I think it should be a 5%, a 10% or a 1% increase.’ The physicians have absolutely no input on the monetary amount. That goes with the lead negotiators, the assistant deputy minister—they negotiate with Treasury (Board Secretariat) and they come up with an amount.”Dr. Price is one of four physicians on the ministry negotiating team. The others are: Dr. Andy Smith, president and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. Dr. Jeff Tyberg, chief of staff and vice president, academic and medical affairs at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie, Ont. Dr. Darren Cargill of Windsor, Ont. who is the provincial clinical co-lead for the Ontario Palliative Care Network.“I think we all view our role is to help the ministry understand what the implications are of various funding models proposed,” Dr. Price said. He said the OMA will propose targeted funding for anything from a particular rural community to how to increase attachment or how to help emergency room wait times. “All of those proposals come in and it is our job to help the ministry decipher those proposals and say, ‘here are the good aspects of it and here are the things you might want to think about if you accept them.’” He gave an example that occurred Monday around the negotiations with the innovation fund—the 30% of the award that goes to targeted investment. “We have a particular issue that we would like to address and so does the OMA. The ministry had a proposal and the OMA had a counter proposal. I spent a couple of hours today with the ministry discussing what that counter proposal would look like. The ministry came up with an idea that disadvantaged a certain group of practitioners and I pointed that out to them. I said, ‘hang on a second, if you do that, here’s the inadvertent consequence,’” he said. “They (the ministry) went, ‘OK, hmm, we didn’t realize that—so is that the norm?’ and they went to the primary care branch, and said, ‘so can you actually capture that’ and they said ‘no, we can’t but that is a good point.’ They (the ministry) went back and reworked the proposal at 5:30 this evening (so the) proposal didn’t disadvantage that particular population of physicians and off it is going to go. It is going to be presented to the OMA on Wednesday (today).”He argues that is the kind of nuance he and the other physician members give the non-physician members of the negotiating team. He added lastly about the numbers: “We would have known that the government offered 3.5% and the OMA offered 22%, that’s bargaining. Did I think that (arbitrator William) Kaplan would award 3% when we’ve had the kind of inflation we’ve had? No.” Dr. Price, who is known for his work studying primary care models, was recently named as the founding dean of Simon Fraser University’s new medical school. “There’s these petitions out there to remove me as the speaker from the FMF and frankly, that would be great if it happened, it would save me a lot of headache preparing for this keynote,” he said. “The amount of time I’ve spent thinking about and working on this keynote is certainly a time suck. It is a honour to be doing it but it is also not the easiest thing.”About Dr. Gandhi and the Ontario Union of FPs calls he said: “Was I disappointed? Sure. Was I surprised? Maybe not, given the political landscape and given what is happening in society in terms of polarization.”“How do you influence the policy at the ministry level to try and make it better,” he said is how sees his role. “The way I view it—as long as I’m keeping the interests of the patient and the system in mind, then I should be doing the right thing. And part of that is physicians need to be appropriately paid for the work they do.”

‘Disappointed:’ Dr. David Price on call to remove him as FMF keynote

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