Drummond and Health

A large number of recommendations in the Drummond Report have to do with health care.  There is a lot there - much of which we have heard before in terms of things like focusing more on home care, patient centered care and evidence based care.  Indeed, the first recommendation on health care made by the Drummond Report is the most likely to be adopted by the provincial government given its affinity for planning:

Recommendation 5-1: “Develop and publish a comprehensive plan to address health care challenges   over the next 20 years.  The plan should set objectives and drive solutions that are built around the following principles..."

Those principles include being patient centered, a fully integrated system-wide approach, more emphasis on chronic care and home care, disease prevention, etc...A plan to address health care over the next twenty years is definitely something that would appeal to the current provincial government and they would be able to apply the expertise acquired in doing the Northern Growth Plan - which also has a long-term horizon of decades and has yet to yield anything tangible.  Indeed, the propensity to embrace a planning rather than an action culture is one of the things that is wrong with Ontario today and in my opinion a key factor in its poor economic performance.  While planning frameworks are necessary, they appear to have become ends in themselves rather than a means to an end.  But I digress.  Back to health.

While much has been made of Drummond's recommendation to bring in a payment freeze for physicians and the remarks that they are among the highest paid in the country, one recommendation appears to have flown under the radar.  Here it is:

 

Recommendation 5-59: "Compensate physicians using a blended model of salary/capitation and fee-for service; the right balance is probably in the area of 70 per cent salary/capitation and 30 per cent fee-for-service."

The Drummond Report appears to advocate a big move away from fee-for-service.  It will be interesting to see what the reaction to this will be.