Fed up with fed forms? Let a central office take care of them, says CFPC

Federal forms are often complex and time-consuming to fill out, yet add very little to family doctors’ bottom line.That’s why the responsibility for reviewing and completing this paperwork should move away from family doctors and into federally funded central offices manned by qualified healthcare workers including doctors, according to the College of Family Physicians of Canada, which recently rolled out a set of recommendations based on its findings from an October 2023 survey on federal forms.“There’s very little medical judgment that goes into completing the forms—we’re mostly asking questions and collecting pieces of information,” said CFPC president and family physician Dr. Michael Green. “Yet family physicians spend over 10 hours per week on these forms, often unpaid and at the expense of patient care.”At the same time the Canadian government should start simplifying its forms—with the guidance of a federally funded task force that includes doctors—and set up dedicated funding to increase compensation for family doctors who complete these forms. In addition to ensuring fair remuneration to physicians, this will also help ensure patients won’t have to pay to get their federal forms filled out.The CFPC would also like to see fewer forms requiring the direct input of a family physician.Read: Governments can improve patient, physician health by reducing ‘red tape’“We've suggested that forms could certainly be improved and we would be happy to help streamline the forms to make them easier to complete,” said Dr. Green. “Because what we're mostly doing is asking people the questions on behalf of the government, which they don't pay us to do. We would like to work it out so that we don’t need to have the same level of involvement, and where we do need to be involved in providing medical information to make it easier to be paid.”Federal forms account for a significant portion of the administrative burden that’s causing so many doctors to burn out. Among the 5,416 family doctors who responded to the CPFC survey, close to 85% cited federal forms as either the main or significant source of their administrative burden. Most doctors also considered their remuneration from completing these forms to be insufficient, while describing the forms as complex and the information they contain to have low value.For example, among the forms most commonly used by family doctors, requests for special access to drug programs were associated with insufficient remuneration by close to 90% of doctors. Read: More health teams, less red tape: How to make comprehensive family medicine attractive againThrough its survey, the CFPC found almost all family physicians want to see federal forms reassessed. Close to 70% said these forms contributed to burnout and poor work-life balance, while almost 40% said federal forms were among the reasons they no longer want to offer comprehensive care.While doctors also have to contend with administrative burden on a provincial or territorial level, addressing federal forms is an important first step, said Dr. Green.“Each province or territory that's failing doctors—they all have their own sets of administrative issues that they can work on with things like centralized referrals and common forms within a province,” he said. “On the federal level, there's this group of forms that’s just an extra load on people. So we would like to see the federal government work with us to decrease the burden of those forms.”Read: 48.82 million hours: How do we lower the number of administrative tasks docs take on each year?

Fed up with fed forms? Let a central office take care of them, says CFPC

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