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By James Peters

Two and Out

PETERS: Moving away from half-measures in the B.C. healthcare system

Oct 7, 2022 | 11:02 AM

WE HEARD ANOTHER MEASURE of our public healthcare crisis recently.

A whopping 40 per cent of Kamloops residents don’t have a family doctor — well above the provincial average.

When you really stop to think about our healthcare system, some of how it is set up is really strange.

While we have socialized medicine in some respects, we still require our family doctors to operate as private businesses.

Providing ongoing health care to people in B.C. is not too dissimilar to providing muffler service to automobiles.

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The problem, though, is that the patients who are the customers in this model don’t get the typical benefits of free enterprise — competitive pricing, innovative products and services, convenience, etc. Yet the clinicians have to deal with all the annoyances and expenses of a private business, like administration and overhead.

The way we have our system set up is a half-measure.

As the Thompson Division of Family Practice says, doctors coming out of school nowadays don’t want to run businesses; they want to be doctors. They don’t want to deal with the half-measure.

And so, it’s our public system that must innovate and adapt to survive — not its strong suit.

Avoiding the half-measure means either committing to socialized medicine on the administrative side or moving away from it all together.

The latter option has always proven distasteful to Canadians; we’re as proud of public health care as we are of hockey and insulin and Michael Bublé.

Until that adaptation, though, perhaps our communities can band together to offer other solutions.

One possibility is doing more to emphasize training not in the direct provision of health care, but in healthcare management.

The B.C. Institute of Technology offers an undergraduate healthcare management program, and other schools such as UBC and Royal Roads offer graduate programs.

Here in Kamloops, our Thompson Rivers University just christened the Bob Gaglardi School of Business and Economics and has a renowned Faculty of Nursing.

Could those two programs get together to develop a healthcare management program, thereby increasing the number of graduates who could take on those business tasks that doctors don’t want?

It’s an idea that deserves some exploration — just like any idea that allows us to begin fixing a system that is about to bleed out.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.