Blog Post Bit Three

I’d Love to Blame the Doctors for our Healthcare Crisis - It Would be an Easy Cure!

The issue most cited for Canada's healthcare crisis is the shortage of doctors, but our doctors are not to blame.  If our doctors and nurses were the "cause" of our problems, we would be in good shape.  Most experts believe that Canada's healthcare system would be in fine condition if we had 20% more doctors and nurses.  And if that's all it took, I'm confident our healthcare professionals, at current numbers, could satisfy the current demand for healthcare services.  However, our healthcare system is so inefficient, I believe, that even 20% more nurses and doctors couldn't solve all of our problems.  

Let me give you just one example.  As we all know, Canada has a massive backlog of surgeries thanks to Covid-19.  And for the past number of months, our healthcare professionals have been working diligently to reduce that backlog.  But we will never get there, not because we need more surgeons but because we have a shortage of anesthesiologists.  Surgeons want to perform surgeries, but we need more anesthesiologists. But our hospitals can’t figure it out.

Bottlenecks like this are typical in manufacturing operations and are routinely resolved by experts in operations research.  The same management discipline has to be applied to the scheduling and running of surgical suites in our hospitals.  

And let me be clear - this is a management problem NOT a "doctor" problem.  If the only thing that changes is the number of doctors, the poor utilization of Canada's surgical suites and the surgical backlogs will continue.