Some excerpts:
Aziz is not alone. Doctors in Canada each spend, on average, nine hours per week on administrative tasks, totaling 42.7 million hours annually across the country, according to a new report from the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which surveyed 1,924 physicians.
The paperwork that fills Aziz’s mornings goes far beyond requisitioning tests and looking over lab work, the kind of things she says any doctor would expect to do.
It’s tracking down patient information that’s spread out over multiple systems. It’s resubmitting the exact same information multiple times because each pharmacy or clinic has its own specific forms.
Digitization isn’t necessarily helping either, she said, because, oftentimes, the software that should be making things easier just isn’t up to par.
“Sometimes it’s one step forward, two steps back,” she said. “You have to click a dozen boxes and then the patient’s history won’t populate because it has a dash, which is not an allowed character, you know?”
This all due to the fiefdom of each province refusing to work with each other instead of on their own. And the feds can’t make them play nice.
Sometimes our Constitution is more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth.
The exclusive powers of Provincial legislatures, enumerated in ss. 92, 92(A) and 93 of the Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982, concern matters of a local nature (also see notes). They include the following:
- Direct Taxation within Province
- Management/Sale of Public Lands belonging to Province
- Prisons
- Hospitals
- Municipalities
- Formalization of Marriage
- Property and Civil Rights
- Administration of Civil/Criminal Justice
- Education
- Incorporation of Companies
- Natural Resources
- Matters of a merely local or private nature
Do they break this out by province?
BC has a pretty good system now… except that it’s almost all hosted in the US.
BC has improved their individual/doctor patient times, but the 6 Healthcare authorities leaves a lot to be desired in the context of efficiency.
I was only speaking to the paperwork issue. The entire system is still a mess as a whole.
Here is the report: https://digitallibrary.cma.ca/media/Digital_Library_PDF/2026 Losing doctors to desk work EN.pdf
See “Appendix B: Provincial/territorial estimates of physician administrative burden and full-time equivalent gain” on page 37.
For BC specifically, there was this recent article:
Family doctors in B.C. are calling on the province to cut digital red tape, saying outdated systems and unnecessary paperwork are slowing patient care and increasing wait times.
It comes as a new national study shows doctors across the province are spending three million hours per year handling administrative work.
The latest report, released by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the Canadian Medical Association, released as part of the Red Tape Awareness Week, found that doctors in B.C. spend nearly 10 hours a week on administrative work.
It estimates that eliminating unnecessary paperwork in B.C. could free up an equivalent of more than 1,400 full-time doctors.
What I don’t understand is the value of this paperwork. A lot of medicine is practiced in data. Isn’t filing out forms a vital component in plugging the data holes?
Yikes. Ok, B.C. here. Xrays were taken almost immediately. I DID have to wait in the emergency for a few hours. I needed an open reduction and internal fixation on the left proximal humerus. I broke and dislocated my shoulder. It was a bad break. I was scheduled fairly quickly. My bill? $0.00. If Alberta thinks they’re going to do well by separating from Canada, they’re not. They are going to lose their universal health care. Your politicians are already introducing private health care. If you can’t pay, you have no health care. You have a health problem? Mortgage your home.
20 “MILLION” hours? seriously??
1920+ doctors 9-10+hrs /week adds up pretty fast. its already 10k hrs spent on paperwork a week from that much surveyed doctors, the survey dint account for the total amount of doctors in canada.
that sounds terrible, it make sense the video i saw about the canadian doctor that closed her clinic due to excessive paperwork.
