In the trillion dollar problem I talked about the cost of chronic illness to productivity.
There is also the issue of skyrocketing medical costs in Canada and the United States. Part of the solution is basic. Give people access to family doctors. Of course, most of us have a family doctor but how long does it take to see him or her?
It is very expensive (and slow) to treat someone in a hospital emergency room when the ailment is something that could be dealt with by a family physician. For people with chronic illness, access to a family doctor who can regularly monitor their overall health as well as tend to basic maintenance of their condition is critical. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen as quickly as it should.
Wait times by country. Click to enlarge.
Research by The Commonwealth Fund shows that only 36 percent of Canadians got a same day or next day appointment when they needed medical attention and a third of them had to wait more than A WEEK. Results in the United States are somewhat better, but still pale in comparison to Australia, New Zealand, and many European countries where waiting times were much shorter.
Of course, even without seeing the numbers, those of us in North America know from experience about wait times. It sometimes takes me almost two weeks see my own family doctor. Think about how ridiculous that sounds.
What is the cost of long wait times for doctors?
As I mentioned before, using a hospital emergency room in lieu of a family physician is wasteful and inefficient. But this isn’t the only cost. If people who need medical attention are waiting for a week or more to get it, what is that doing to their productivity at work? How badly are their medical conditions deteriorating? While I don’t have exact numbers on how much tardy medical treatment costs organizations, I imagine it is significant.
What to do to shorten wait times for doctors
Well in the big picture we need to move from a system that caters to acute illness to one that recognizes the challenges of chronic illness. There obviously needs to be more incentives to get people to practice family medicine, but there are other strategies that can make the system more efficient.
The countries that have been most successful in reducing wait times practice more of a team approach to health where nurses work with nutritionists and other health professionals under the supervision of a doctor. The doctor is therefore overseeing care but many of the operational details (such as injections, vital signs etc.) are being done by others who can do them more efficiently and allow the doctors to treat more patients.
Ultimately, our health care system is much like a house, if the basic foundation is weak it threatens the whole structure.
