KREW KUTS: Health Care Challenges
By Bernie Krewski
NAVIGATION
This is now a common term in health care. It signifies the challenges for many people in finding care and remedies in the health delivery system.
While attending an appointment at University Hospital last week, I noticed this sign in the waiting area:
Alberta Cancer Foundation: Patient Navigation Program – Cancer Patient Navigators guide patients through the complex maze of cancer tests, appointments, treatments, and emotions. They offer close to home support to ease the journey for cancer patients and their families. To find out more, contact your nearest Patient Navigator.
The map lists the names of two people in Medicine Hat and one person in Drumheller, cancer navigators closest to Oyen.
Years ago, when someone was ill, the expression was: “Go and see your doctor.” Now, it seems, a common phrase is: “How and where can I find the right doctor?”
PATIENT ENGAGEMENT
Less well known is another conventional term, “patient engagement.” It reflects how health care providers expect patients to conduct themselves. No longer can they remain passive recipients of care. People, they argue, will not benefit from their health care unless they bring knowledge, skills and motivation to participate actively in the service that is provided.
Contemporary health care has moved from a disease-centred to a patient-centred model.
These refinements are believed to make care more efficient and improve health outcomes.
People must make informed choices about clinicians, coordinate communications among providers, and manage complex treatments on their own. Now, for example, innovations in surgical care mean that individuals are discharged from hospital “quicker but sicker.”
People like me would likely be regarded as engaged patients because we are actively involved in advocacy and research. I have been mentoring medical students for the last ten years as well as being a patient-participant in more than ten science-based studies.
Last week The Echo kindly published our CBC Cancer Story. On June 15, the Edmonton Journal published an Opinion column by Dr. Paul Parks, the current president of the Alberta Medical Association, and a physician practicing in Medicine Hat. Available on the Internet, it is entitled “Let’s get new pay model for family doctors to the finish line.” Here is the link:
I strongly objected to some of his unnecessary remarks. Here is my response.
LETTER TO EDITOR – Edmonton Journal
In his Opinion column (June 15), Dr. Paul Parks, president of the Alberta Medical Association, briefly describes new and commendable initiatives in family and rural medicine and the payment system for physicians. However, the rest of his commentary is a crass and insensitive dissection of recent developments in health care – drowned in misinformation. For this reason, it requires a response.
“Lost our way,” he claims, “We made more and more investments in super-specialized areas of care and forgot about focusing on keeping Albertans healthy in the first place.” Adding, “all we can offer is highly specialized sickness care.”
What an astounding and contentious statement for an A.M.A president to make – implying that heart and kidney transplants, neurosurgery and other more expensive surgical procedures have starved primary care. In doing so, he sets one segment of health care in competition with another! Has he no awareness of equity and “universality,” a fundamental principle in the Canada Health Act which assures that all of us are entitled to health services on uniform terms and conditions, regardless of financial status or location?
I suspect that the real target for his invective is head & neck reconstruction at iRSM at the Misericordia Hospital. Two days before, under the headline “A Lifelong Relationship,” the Journal published Cindy Tran’s interviews with Michelle Fuller and Brenda Frederick, two long-time patients at the Institute for the Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine.
Augmenting his diatribe, having apparently lost his way, Dr. Parks gives us three 500 mg doses of the noxious political slogan, “Alberta Advantage.”
He would be wise to update his political credentials and read the scholarly, peer-reviewed book, “Alberta: A Health System Profile” (2022) by John Church and Neale Smith.
There he will find that Alberta is second to last in the efficiency of its per capita health care spending (p. 47), failing to resolve wait times issues since the mid-1990s (p. 137), and performing poorly in accessing several forms of cancer treatments (p. 149).
Facing hurdles like Dr. Parks’ demeaning and unjustified comments, accompanied by the wall of silence from Covenant Health and AHS regarding the future of iRSM, is not unusual for many head and neck cancer patients like me. It is an integral part of our voiceless lives.
Several of us have been mentoring students in the Faculty of Medicine during their first two years of medical school. A few days ago, the students said this in their letter of thanks: Your “insights have deeply ingrained in us a commitment to always recognize the humanity of each patient, ensuring they feel heard, respected, and cared for.”
The words of these students are also reflected in the Health Charter incorporated into The Alberta Health Act, 2010 - patients have the right to “be treated with respect and dignity.”