A surgeon and former head of the Canadian Medical Association said he believes the government’s health data fails to make for better care and falls short on privacy and accuracy..Some Canadians are concerned with provincial health data falling into federal hands as Ottawa pushes a digital health ID, but Dr. Brian Day says the status quo is already concerning..“I do resent governments (provincial or federal) having unfettered access to citizens’ health records. BC laws force doctors to share confidential patient files with government inspectors. A Canadian’s health record is considered public property. Patients are not only denied the right to block government access, but neither their consent nor even notification are required,” Day told the Western Standard..“I personally witnessed a situation in which a newly elected government’s agents demanded access to the personal medical files, including mental health assessments, of a recently defeated provincial cabinet minister of the outgoing government. Perhaps one of the fears of an independent health sector is that it will limit the state’s ability to spy on the personal data of its subjects.”.Day, a Vancouver surgeon who founded the Cambie Surgery Centre in 1996, is also distrustful of the broader, less personal, health information the government keeps..“I have become a cynic with respect to government collected data,” Day said..“I do believe we need to have accurate — but not fudged — data on overall statistics. But it should perhaps be a job for more independent auditors general, not politically motivated politicians and / or the bureaucrats that answer to them.”.Day’s 14-year legal fight against the B.C. government to allow private health insurance has revealed disturbing examples of the public system skewing numbers to avoid accountability..“At our trial, BC Children’s Hospital President Susan Wannamaker described changing the dates inserted by the surgeon’s office on hospital booking forms which made wait times for children appear shorter than they were,” Day recalled..“VGH [Vancouver General Hospital] Surgeon in Chief, Dr. Masri, described how surgeons were instructed to stop seeing consultations because it made wait times appear larger. .“He was asked to re-prioritize patients — government prioritizes and records patients on wait lists at levels 1 to 5 based on severity of pain and other criteria that determine urgency. Specialists were asked to designate patients in severe pain to a less urgent category of moderate pain, again to fudge the data.”.Distorted or accurate, private or public, the failures of Canada's medical system still come through. As Western Standard reported February 6, walk-in clinics using the Medimap service reported the average wait time grew to 79 minutes in 2022. In North Vancouver, patients spent an average of two hours, 40 minutes waiting to see a physician..“It’s just another symptom of BC’s leadership in the 90’s in cutbacks of medical schools and restrictions on foreign and immigrant doctors. They forced foreign trained doctors here on visas to return after one year,” Day said..In the 1990s, the BC government created a Royal Commission on Health Care and Costs chaired by Appeal Court Justice Peter Seaton. Day does not recall the commission fondly..“UBC economist Robert Evans, a man known for having anti-physician views, was the main voice in health policy on the commission. He published an article in which he blamed the failings of the system on doctors.”.Day reports Evans as saying, “A central cause of the problem was the oversupply of physicians, which tended to generate greater utilization of services…there are too many doctors…and a supply-induced demand…a bed built was a (hospital) bed filled.”.Other quotes from the Seaton Commission also stick out in Day’s mind: .“A central cause of the problem was the oversupply of physicians which tended to generate greater utilization of services.”“I honestly don’t believe there is a shortage of nurses.”“The commission recommends the Ministry of Health and the BCMA give priority to the joint development of a program to limit the number of physicians.”.Day calls the recommendation of fewer doctors and nurses “a bizarre proposition” for better care..“Nationwide, led by BC’s NDP government, medical school admissions across the country were cut by up to 30%, immigrant doctors were denied licenses, and nursing schools were closed,” Day said..“I must re-emphasize the blame for the shortages of health professionals rests solely with governments — that monopoly itself has made the decision not to train enough of them.”
