Welcome to Canada. A hospital is penalized for being too efficient:
The Health Department has ordered the hospital to stop doing hip and knee surgeries until the next fiscal year, which begins in April, according to Dr. Ethan Lichtblau.The hospital in the Rosemont district has hit a government-set target number, and depleted its prosthesis budget for this year.
“The government has actually stopped our hospital for the six weeks from doing any more total knee or total hip replacements even though we’ve been very efficient,” Lichtblau said Friday. “They’ve done it because we’ve gone over our target, which was an arbitrary target.”
The hospital has been focused on reducing waiting times for surgery, Lichtblau said.
Now, the government order will force some patients to wait unnecessarily, the surgeon laments.
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{ 5 comments }
They need to move the fiscal year so that when it comes time to have vacations all around as the reward for efficiency that they get the time off when it’s warm out.
As a salried guy myself I’d think it’s great to wrap up the year in 10 months and kick back for a while.
Comrade Stalin is appaled by this horrific crime.
These damn Canadians are way to lenient! The surgeon and hospital administrators should be thrown to rot in GULAG for disobeying orders from the STATE.
Welcome to the centrally planned economy.
It’s all about rationing care. It happens to other specialties as well. My friend who’s an ophthalmologist tells me when the yearly allocation of intraocular lenses is gone, then there’s no more cataract surgery for the remainder of the year.
He also tells me there’s a cap on how much he’s permitted to earn, and that cap gets lowered every year. It’s all about getting doctors to provide less care every year than they provided the year before.
Thanks for publishing this article. It is an extremely important issue not only for Quebecers but for all Canadians. This is one of the factors that contributes to long wait times in Canada in the first place!!
Sincerely,
Ethan Lichtblau, MD, FRCS(C)
Chief Orthopedic Surgery
Santa Cabrini Hospital
The truth is that poor Canadians face the same defacto rationing that poor Americans do. Rich Canadians head for the Cleveland Clinic, The Mayo Clinic or hundreds of other quality venues.
A poor Canadian may wait a year for a hip a poor working American
may never get one. There is probably a happy medium.
This comraed Stalin stuff is puerile,
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