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Why is our health care system and government broken?
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Dr. Zafar Essak, MD - Vancouver, BC - October 6, 2024
I decided to write a series of posts covering different aspects of our health care system and government to help us apply our thinking to the problems and solutions. We need a change in our expectations of professional leaders, government leaders and how government works if we are to save our publicly funded health care system and our democratic rights.
Part 1. How health care administration over took funding for doctors.
Part 2. Early closure of debate erodes our parliamentary democracy.
Part 3. The importance of open dialog and informed consent.
Stay tuned for more to come.
AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
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On October 26, 2024, Associated Press published a story detailing findings of researchers that the OpenAI transcription tool Whisper, used by clinics and hospitals, is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers.
Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.
Why is our health care system and government broken? Part 4.
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Dr Zafar Essak - Vancouver, BC - October 10, 2024
Part 4 in a series covering different aspects of our health care system and government. Let’s apply our thinking to the problems and solutions.
Part 4. No consent called "passive consent" as BC elementary and high school students are presented survey questionnaires.
First, you may not even realize that in BC elementary and high schools, students of all ages (early years, middle years and youth) have been presented with surveys to complete. This has been done without requiring parental consent or even awareness.
The BC NDP Government refers to it as "passive consent". Teachers are providing children with tablet computers to answer questions about themselves, their families and others living in the household. Children who are reluctant and don’t know if they should do this are reassured it is all fine, they can trust this is all okay.
Some children may be too young to realize that it’s like talking to strangers. These days we should all know the dangers are worse with computers online. So, why would we be teaching young children to reveal information into a computer? (1)
Furthermore, who is PopDataBC and what do they do? Who funds it?
Why is our health care system and government broken? Part 2.
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Dr. Zafar Essak, MD - Vancouver, BC - October 6, 2024.
Part 2 in a series covering different aspects of our health care system and government. Let’s apply our thinking to the problems and solutions.
Part 2. Early closure of debate erodes our parliamentary democracy.
Early closure of debate is important to health care because it was used by the current BC NDP government to push through the Health Professions and Occupations Act (HPOA) in 2022, with changes to the licensing of doctors and other health care professionals.(1) Early closure of debate was also used by the BC NDP to push through three additional far reaching pieces of legislation.
So, what is early closure of debate and why does it matter?
Why is our health care system and government broken? Part 1.
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Dr. Zafar Essak, MD - Vancouver, BC - October 6, 2024.
Part 1 in a series covering different aspects of our health care system and government. Let’s apply our thinking to the problems and solutions.
Part 1. How health care administration over took funding for doctors.
Every day we hear reports that our health care system is broken and having difficulty keeping up with the health needs of patients and people throughout BC and across the country. Politicians say it’s a lot of unexpected circumstances, they’re doing the best that can be done; they're following what the experts are telling them, and we should trust them to carry on with it.
Are these unexpected circumstances or are they foreseeable outcomes?
Why is our health care system and government broken? Part 3.
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Dr. Zafar Essak, MD - Vancouver, BC - October 9, 2024
Part 3 in a series covering different aspects of our health care system and government. Let’s apply our thinking to the problems and solutions.
Part 3. The importance of open dialog and informed consent.
Open dialog is the foundation for informed consent and trust.
We expect informed consent to be upheld in all interactions with medical and health professionals along with other professionals and individuals in our lives including teachers, lawyers, paramedics and others.
Would we allow medical treatments to be given to us and our children without our informed consent?
For informed consent we need open dialog, assuring that the interaction is entirely open and transparent and the provider conducts themselves confidentially and ethically without conflict of interest. Information must not be withheld, delayed or obscured. This is the foundation of trust.
Have our political leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and BC NDP Premier David Eby, failed to uphold the importance of open dialog and informed consent?
Documentary "Duty To Document" highlights the erosion of democracy in BC, in Canada, and around the World
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Dr Z. Essak, MD - Vancouver BC - June 6, 2021.
This is a very important and timely documentary illustrating from our own governments in BC and Canada how critical records are disappearing from public view. It highlights the "triple delete scandal" from 2015 when it came to light the BC Government was improperly deleting email records concerning missing and murdered indigenous women along the "Highway of Tears". The documentary illustrates the escalating, troubling trend in the use of post-it notes and the failure to keep records. A trend seen not only in government, but in associations and corporations striking at the heart of transparency and democracy.
What loud bells will wake BC doctors and the public to the dangers of Bill 36, the HPOA?
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Dr. Zafar Essak, MD - Vancouver, BC - November 6, 2023.
There is a sleeping sickness throughout our land. It has found its way into health care and affected all the doctors. It is not some esoteric thing happening in some small political arena or lawyers club. This impacts all of BC and all of us: the ability of doctors to practice medicine the way they were taught and trained, according to their conscience and oath for the benefit of patients.
The significance of Bill 36, the Health Professions and Occupations Act, is profound and the association, Doctors of BC, should be ringing alarm bells. Instead, they are subduing the importance of it, convincing all doctors to move on to the regulations, like lemmings over the cliff. Not only is this unhelpful to doctors, it is actually dangerous for doctors with their purpose and professional obligations to deliver health care to patients. Bells need to ring everywhere, and the association should be dissolved.
The Tenth Nerve: a brain surgeon's stories of the patients who changed him
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Penguin Random House Canada has published this book and I hope you will enjoy it.
These are the stories of seven brave patients whose close encounters changed me into a better person and surgeon. It is a book about discoveries—both medical discoveries (including two new diseases) that I have provided my patients and personal discoveries that my patients have prompted in me. The scalpel can only go so deep, and technical skill can only take you so far. Real understanding of an illness requires listening and genuine care. The Tenth Nerve is a book about curiosity, the wonder of the human brain, and the courage of a few remarkable patients.
Federal Government seeks intervenor status in B.C. health care court case
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Z. Essak, MD - Vancouver - April 26, 2016.
Below is a link to the Globe and Mail article from April 13, 2016.
Hopefully, the debate around the court case, involving Dr. Brian Day's private Cambie Surgery Centre and the BC Provincial Government with a trial scheduled to begin June 6, will not become polarized with views of exclusivity between public and private health care but instead what we could and should do to make public health care more effective so that escape valves, like private care, are less needed without eradicating access to private care by individuals should they need it.
How far do individuals have to go? If the public system delivers the needed service great. If not, is there private care here at home in Canada or do people have to go to other countries?
