Our Big Brains at the CIHI, University of Toronto, Health Ministry and the Ontario hospital Association are still of the opinion that quality of service is not a matter of providing services but a matter of an expensive report card. Who cares what the roots of the problems are in health care, what is important today is to run the business of health care through opinion polls as anything else.

 And I am becoming disenchanted with the mantra of running our social businesses through opinion polls. Certainly we need opinion polls, but we must not exaggerate with their use to obscure the roots of our social problems. For instance, we don't have enough medical doctors and nurses, and what is the relevancy of knowing that Ontario's hospitals score 88% approval rate from their patient survey?

I have headache just thinking at the manipulative ranking of all these hospitals in accordance to dozens of different criteria, and I still have more headache thinking about how all these hospitals are rated in accordance to dozens of different averages for different criteria. Where is our leadership, where is our sense of social direction, where is the intelligent common sense when our own governments run our social business through opinion surveys?

It is just like watching CTV News and listening to the ups and downs of the stock market every 15 minutes of any working day. The corporate shares go up and down, there are the big winners and the big losers of the day. And so for Ontario's hospitals; one big winner is the Montfort Hospital "scoring above average in 12 of 37 categories, including physician care and client satisfaction, and averaging 3.4 stars out of five in 37 sub-categories," and the big loser is the Ottawa hospital with an accumulated deficit of about $80 million and "scoring above average in only one of the 37 categories."

We must understand that our hospital care is publicly funded with the obvious public expectation of an adequate hospital care. Now think about the reward and punishment mentality of the Harris' government in health care when the winner Montfort Hospital receives two performance grants of $1,294.239 and $1,625,133 for its ability to put taxpayers' dollars to good use, while the loser Ottawa Hospital has its board fired and replaced with former health minister Dennis Timbrell.

With this reward and punishment mentality in health care we end up in being all losers.

Reference

Patients give hospitals high marks. 88% satisfied with care; CHEO, Montfort tops in city, Matthew Sekeres, Janet Hunter and April Lindgren, The Ottawa Citizen, Tuesday 17 July 2001 http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/010717/5007181.html