The Liberal Plan for Regional Health Authority Reform

On Sept 17 we unveiled Liberal plan rfor reform of the Regional Health Authorities. It is outlined below.

Under the Manitoba NDP, there are really serious management problems with health care in our province and these problems are putting the future of universal medicare in Manitoba under seige.

We believe major action and major improvements are needed and we have put forward a plan to put our province’s ailing health care system back on the road to health.

Our plan is titled: “Delivering the Care You Need, When You Need It”.

It has been delivered as a 30 page written submission to the provincial government’s external review committee examining Manitoba’s struggling regional health authority system.

Our Liberal document has been drafted by the four Manitoba physicians who ran as Liberal candidates in the last provincial election. It outlines a detailed seven point policy program for a major overhaul the current RHA system.

The Liberal seven point plan includes the following recommendations.
1) Establish accountability as a fundamental principle in the delivery of health care in Manitoba by:
· making RHAs wholly accountable for both the health care delivered in the RHA and the full health care of residents within the RHA (along the lines of the original Swift Current RHA model);
· making RHAs directly and primarily accountable to the people of the RHA by having the majority of board members elected by Manitobans who live within the RHA’s region;
· replacing global budgeting for RHAs with funding based on services actually delivered.
2) Replace the use of wait lists to ration health care with a legal guarantee of timely access to quality care in Manitoba through:
· a genuine Patient’s Bill of Rights that guarantees the principle of timely access to quality care in Manitoba;
· a Medical Standards Quality Council to establish provincial standards for wait times;
· an Access Enforcement Office with the authority to send patients for immediate care if they have not been treated in the mandated time.
3) Change the current bureaucratic model of health care delivery to one that puts the patient and family physician first, instead of bypassing or marginalizing the family physician.
4) Replace the current fragmented approach to specialist care in Manitoba by establishing multidisciplinary specialist care networks that report directly to the province.
5) Reduce costly medical errors in Manitoba’s health care system by:
· introducing a “Sorry Works” approach based on an Apology Act to remove much of the legal chill on reporting medical errors and critical incidents;
· creating an expert provincial team separate from individual RHAs to investigate medical errors and set health care practice processes and standards.
6) Provide better integration of public health in the health care delivery system to improve the prevention of preventable diseases such as diabetes and FASD by:
· treating diseases like diabetes as the medical epidemics they are with mandatory monthly reporting of new cases and a focused province-wide prevention effort.
7) Place Jordan’s Principle as a primary operating principle in the delivery of health care for Manitoba’s aboriginal people and establish a renewed cooperative approach among First Nations, the federal government and the provincial government.
A copy of the Manitoba Liberals’ submission to the RHA Review Committee is available at: liberal-rha-external-review-submission.pdf