For the past nine months, I have been visiting my sister who is dying in Nova Scotia. This experience has truly sensitized me to the needs of those who need palliative care, and I now appreciate how much I will want to be able to control how and where my life ends. But this is …
When I first reviewed the Government of Ontario’s approach to legal marijuana, I was disappointed. I was hoping for an approach with a strong foundation in public health. I feel strongly about this and wrote about my concerns for the Ottawa Citizen. As I read the views of other health stakeholders in legal marijuana, I …
The youth in my practice with the most complex mental health problems are those who have grown up “in care”. The expression “in care” refers to the fact that a child or youth is not living at home but rather with a foster family or in a residential care facility, usually called a “group home”. These …
In the next week or so, there will be so much detailed analysis of the Auditor General’s Report on Physician Billing in Ontario that the small observation I am making here today here will be lost. As I reviewed the 57 pages, the details and references convinced me that the analysis had been seriously undertaken. …
Last week, Dr. Del Dhanoa, a radiologist from Northern Ontario, asked some questions that I decided to answer as another blog since they continue the series I have been working on. The questions also spark further debate about whether the Minister of Health and Long Term Care has completely explained his vision of health care …
This is Mental Illness Awareness Week 2015 and I want to talk about my physician heroes for mental health. The doctor heroes of my life and work this week are my colleagues at The Royal, the tertiary care psychiatric hospital in Ottawa that serves Eastern Ontario. In this especially difficult time, when doctors are facing …
My consideration today is on the government practice of cutting back in healthcare, specifically on hospital and physician services in Ontario, and the impact this has had over the past few years. Let’s begin with the hospital cutbacks. This month, in my community, three hospitals have announced staff reductions in order to match this year’s …
Last night I spoke to the physicians of the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa about the unilateral cuts that the Government of Ontario has made to physician services in Ontario. Resolute, solemn, confused: these were the expressions on their faces as I described the cuts to the Physician Services Budget, the budget for doctors’ fees that …
