Medical specialists: the government “has put a foot in the mouth”

File Photo, Jocelyn Malette
Dr. Yves Lamontagne

QMI agency

On Wednesday 21 February 2018 13:11

UPDATE
On Wednesday 21 February 2018 13:11

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MONTREAL – dr. Yves Lamontagne, who has chaired the College of physicians from 1998 to 2010, believes that the government Couillard “put a foot in the mouth in an appalling way” by paying $ 2 billion to medical specialists, while their compensation had already caught up and even surpassed that of their counterparts in other provinces.

According to the agreement unveiled last week, Quebec will pay $ 2 billion for the period covering the years 2015 to 2023. Specialists will be entitled to an increase of 11.2 % over eight years, which represents an amount of 511 million $. In addition, physicians will receive a one-time amount of $ 1.5 billion to settle an accumulated debt for any amounts that are not allocated since 2012.

“For once, I agree with Amir Khadir, who said that it is a shame and that they would have had to take this money and put it in the home care setting,” said Mr. Lamontagne, Wednesday, in an interview with Mario Dumont, LCN.

“The election is going to wear it. The misfortune is that every damned election, it is always on the health. It will get better, we are going to put more money, but each time it doesn’t change”, he continued.

Yves Lamontagne stressed that some doctors say they are “uncomfortable”, going as far to write it down black on white in open letters published in newspapers.

Instead of going out mainly to talk about money, doctors specialists in quebec would have any benefit to share ideas to be “more effective”, believes Mr. Lamontagne.

“It has an image problem and the more it goes, the more the image degrades,” said Lamontagne, who has written several books and pursued a career in psychiatry.

The organization of the work

Among the solutions that evokes Mr. Lamontagne, there was the one to attack the organization’s work by reviewing the tasks of each of the health professionals.

“I’m going to the doctors, he said. It was given to the nurses of things to do. They gave them six recently. Example: nurses can now monitor patients who suffer from diabetes. The nurses could do the same thing with the auxiliary nurses, and nursing assistants with the employees.”

To unblock the system and achieve the changes desired, it will be necessary to stop working in silo and focusing on the organization of work, according to Yves Lamontagne, who sees in the present situation, not only the agreement of remuneration of medical specialists, but also as the outputs of nurses out of breath “that we have a serious problem here that must be addressed,” he said.

“I give you an example that I was horrified. When my father was in palliative care in a large Montreal hospital, the attendant to the sick arrived with a tray for the food, my operates said, I was there, “can you close the tray, it is too far away”. She asked him to call a nurse, because it was not in his tasks.”

The government Couillard could turn the side of the English-speaking hospitals to see other models, according to Mr. Lamontagne. “Why the English succeed. The nurses work 12 hours per day, three days per week. The nurses of McGill, you won’t hear them complain,”-he dropped, saying that”in Québec, per capita, we have more nurses than anywhere else in Canada”.