Outgoing Alberta Medical Association President Calls for 'Patient-Focused' Health Care System

In his valedictory address at the AMA's annual meeting this morning, Dr. LaBuick said: "The health care system doesn't exist for doctors and nurses and other health professionals. It doesn't exist for administrators and it doesn't exist for politicians. The health care system exists for patients!"

Patients must "be seen as the centre of the system," Dr. LaBuick said. "Regarding patients as a liability and as a cost are attitudes that should not be tolerated in the 21st century."

One way to change this mentality is to move hospitals and regional health authorities off block funding and to "patient-focused funding," he said, adding the concept of patient-focused or incentive-based funding is not foreign to physicians - "we call it fee for service."

Two key indicators of how Alberta Health Services will impact physicians and their ability to provide care to patients will be the new province-wide medical staff bylaws and the medical staff structure that AHS adopts.

"The bylaws will reflect the board's understanding of the importance of physicians having the ability to be advocates for our patients and our colleagues, not only within the system itself, but also publicly," he said.

"Physicians have a responsibility to speak out on behalf of their patients, whether it be an individual or a group of patients; or, as in the case of medical officers, whole populations.

"Because I want to be very clear - as physicians, our obligation is to our patients. Governments and their departments and health authorities must not be our master."

"If a health care system wants to deliver timely care and quality care, it cannot afford to alienate physicians, to disengage physicians and to marginalize physicians" as occurred in the mid-1990s, Dr. LaBuick said.

As a professional association, the mission and the activities of the AMA go far beyond financial matters. Its vision is Patients First(R).

"Obviously we have a mandate to be advocates for physicians and we are the voice of the medical profession in Alberta," Dr. LaBuick said, but the association is active on many other fronts. For example:

- The new protocol that has really improved access to hip-and-knee replacement surgeries

- Primary care networks

- Perinatal health

- Smoke-free public places

- Childhood obesity

- ATVs and children

- Junk food in schools

Inter-provincial mobility agreement may reduce doctors in rural, northern Alberta

A few weeks ago the provincial and territorial premiers agreed to make it easier for the members of various professions and trades to practise and work anywhere in Canada. Alberta and British Columbia were already completing such reciprocity.

This has "the potential to dramatically change where physicians practise, not only within Alberta but across Canada," Dr. LaBuick said.

"It remains to be seen what the impact will be on the ability of the different jurisdictions to attract and keep physicians, especially those international medical graduates now restricted to rural, remote and northern areas." Places like High Prairie, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Vermilion, Pincher Creek.

Patients First(R) is a registered trademark of the Alberta Medical Association.

NOTE: Dr. Noel W. Grisdale, a Black Diamond family physician, becomes the 2008-09 Alberta Medical Association President at the close of Saturday's meeting.

Cell: (780) 907-9003