Examining collegiality in Saskatchewan - Saskatchewan Medical ...

P hysician collegiality
is alive in Saskatchewan,
but is it well
By Kerilyn Voigt
Dr. Noel Doig has seen a lot of change in
his career. The retired family physician
emigrated from England to Saskatchewan
in 1958, just before Tommy Douglas
announced his plans for Medicare
in 1959. He was active throughout the
Medicare crisis of 1962 and has recently
written a book about those years. He
was Chief of Staff at City Hospital in
Saskatoon in the 70s and early 80s, and
he served on Saskatchewan Medical
Association committees continuously
from 1967 to 2010.
Dr. Doig fondly remembers the Saskatchewan
medical community of the
1960s and 1970s. “All of the doctors were
friends. It didn’t matter if you were
a specialist or a GP or so on,” he said.
“That doesn’t exist now.” He worries
that general practitioners are practically
excluded from hospital work, impacting
how patient care is delivered.
There’s no denying that the way medicine
is practised in Saskatchewan has
changed drastically over the past 50
years. Physicians are more specialized,
system demands have increased, and
health regions are pushed to deliver
the most care for the least money in
the shortest amount of time. Has physician
collegiality become a casualty in
the ongoing battle for optimal health
care delivery
Defining Collegiality
What is collegiality
“There are certain values that underpin
any sort of professional relationship,
and those values should translate into
behaviours,” says Dr. Christina Vuksic,
senior medical officer at Regina
Qu’Appelle Health Region. “The values
that lead to the ephemeral thing we
call collegiality are things like respect, a
sense of mutual collaboration and trust,
openness, transparency, a common focus
on the patient, and compassion.”
Dr. Vuksic goes on to explain that
the resulting behaviours include mu-
4 Spring 2011 SMA News Digest