Paging Dr. Panda

Explaining Tom Osborne's about-face on virtual doctor visits

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Editorial Note: For some reason this piece missed the lineup. Must have been pulled in favour of something else and over time, there wasn’t a convenient spot to slide it back in. Tom Osborne’s departure from the health portfolio - announced on Friday but not happening until July - gives us a chance to put it out there in advance of Monday’s deeper take on Tom’s Friday trash event.

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Photo by Lukas W. on Unsplash

Big headline on a government news release:

Provincial Government Increasing Access to Health Care…

There was health minister Tom Osborne last November telling us all about a contract worth $11 million with some outfit from the States to make sure that people without a doctor “will have increased access to primary health care.”

Tom didn’t say doctor because these days, the Disney-like world of “re-imagining” health care calls the job doctors do more often than not something for a “primary care provider” or PCP. It allows for nurse practitioners in the mix but most of the people doing the job in Newfoundland and Labrador are medical doctors even 25 years after the Great NP Revolution that then-health minister Joan Marie Aylward birthed to solve the problem of people who did not have a family doctor.

PCP is also the common way of referring to a particular drug called phencyclidine (fen-sike-luh-deen) that causes intense hallucinations.

But I digress.

Well sort of digress because some of you may feel like you are having intense hallucinations as the news over the weekend featured health minister Tom Osborne announcing he would *decrease* access to health care.

Cut back on access to virtual care offered by doctors who actually live and work in Newfoundland and Labrador not because of an actual problem but because - as VOCM put it - a “concern” by unnamed people that “some would focus primarily on virtual care when what people are demanding is in-person appointments.”

The word-choice is instructive here, as is Tom’s vagueness.