Manitoba Liberal Leader Dr. Jon Gerrard on healthcare: what we need is to change to a budget which is based on the actual services delivered

Dr. Gerrard held a press conference Thursday at HSC where he spoke about two very important topics:

1. The NDP government needs to move away from a global, trickle-down budget and use a budget based on actual services delivered.

2. The NDP government needs to spend more money on Type 2 diabetes prevention, as the human and financial cost is staggering and preventable.

Here is some news coverage on the conference:

Diabetes an epidemic that needs to be addressed: Liberals (Jen Skerritt, Winnipeg Free Press)

Manitoba Liberal leader calling for changes in health-care funding (CBC News)

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Healthcare: Another Big Issue for Elmwood Voters

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, when I’m not out campaigning or working on other specific issues.

For some reason, the NDP’s complete failure to fix healthcare has been a difficult issue to communicate.  I imagine it’s because healthcare is such a complex issue, affecting every Manitoban in a different way.  But no matter what your experiences have been, there are some universal problems with our healthcare under the NDP, and I’m going to list them now:

The Big Six Failures of NDP Health Care

1. Hallway Medicine: Patients are still left in the hallways of our hospitals with no privacy, and with no improvement in sight.

2. Exploding Bureaucracy: While doctors and nurses leave Manitoba for better work conditions, the WRHA bureaucracy has TRIPLED in size since 1999.  The WRHA is building two new office buildings to make sure they have room to hire even more managers.

3. No Accountability: The preventable death of Brian Sinclair led to a bungled internal investigation, a health minister who said she was too busy to comment, and a Premier who tried his best to hide from reporters.  No one is being held accountable.

4. Patient’s Rights: The NDP continually refuse to support Dr. Gerrard in his work to guarantee the rights of patients for timely treatment and access to their own health information.

5. Urgent Care: The NDP refuse to consider the creation of new Urgent Care clinics to reduce the strain on Winnipeg’s ERs.

6. Health Care Funding: The NDP way of funding healthcare funnels money to bureaucrats instead of supporting the work of nurses and doctors.  The NDP refuse to introduce a more efficient and accountable funding system based on the delivery of services.

Not Enough Talk About Health

A good number of people have been asking me why we haven’t been hitting harder on health care during this by-election.  The truth is, too many people I’ve met have given up on the idea of improvements in health care.  Having lived through decades of failed health policies, many voters have started to believe the NDP government’s idea that what we have is the best we can do.

But this notion that we can’t have something better is going to stop.  We are hitting hard on health care this week, making sure that every voter in Elmwood is aware of just how the NDP is failing in healthcare, and how the Liberal party and our leader, world-renowned physician Dr. Jon Gerrard, will continue our fight to reform healthcare for all Manitobans.

And how do we reform?

Fixing Health Care: Eight Steps to a Better System

Step 1: Change to funding per service instead of universal funding.  Every patient examination, every treatment and every surgery is billed to the province, reflecting a realistic cost.  Instead of capping funding for each hospital, funding is paid out as needed with no quotas or maximums.

Step 2: Legislate a Patient’s Bill of Rights, guaranteeing both timely access to treatment and timely access for a patient to personal health information.  A Medical Standards Quality Council would be created to establish provincial standards for wait times based on medical and scientific considerations rather than political ones.

Step 3: Revisit urgent care clinics as a way of reducing pressure on emergency wards.  These clinics can be run by the government or by other groups, as long as they are universal and all billing is paid by the province and not by the patients.

Step 4: Establishment of an independent enforcement office to send patients for immediate care when their right to timely access has been compromised, whether that care is within Manitoba or elsewhere in Canada.

Step 5: Build more long-term care spaces to move patients with chronic care needs out of hospital sooner.

Step 6: Implement an electronic health system to standardize health records in Manitoba.  This will allow both for proper reporting on wait times and for better access for a patient to their personal health records in accordance with the Patient’s Bill of Rights.

Step 7: Establish a blame-free reporting system and a Medical Procedure Improvement team to prevent medical errors from re-occurring.

Step 8: Bring improvements to both aboriginal health care (emphasizing prevention through better access to overlooked necessities) and mental health care with a community-based focus.

It’s time to take the first step.  With support of the people of Elmwood, I hope to work along with Dr. Gerrard and Mr. Lamoureux to bring these improvements forward in the legislature.  I also intend to bring these solutions forward to Manitobans as a whole, so that we can all expect and demand that this work begin immediately.

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