Thank you very much to each of you for coming before this committee. I think I join the other members in saying that it's clear you've done some great work on this in your respective fields and hospitals and areas of influence. You're to be commended for that, and certainly this committee and this Parliament can learn a lot from you.
First of all, we know this issue is extremely important to Canadians. It's extremely important to the Government of Canada. As all of us in this room and most of the Canadian public know, it's one of the five priorities identified by the government to have this health care wait time guarantee for patients.
I come from Saskatchewan, where under the provincial NDP government we have the longest wait times in the country for diagnostic and surgical procedures. My time doesn't permit me to get into examples of that. I want to talk a little about general practitioners and the shortage of GPs in this country.
Dr. Lewanczuk, you talked about one of the strategies that you've employed being to empower general practitioners. I wonder if you could comment quickly--and it's certainly not just limited to Dr. Lewanczuk--on the shortage of GPs, how best to address that problem.
Many GPs in this country are not taking new patients. At least that's the case in my home city of Regina, where it can be difficult to find a general practitioner taking new patients. Often you have to go to medi-centres and seek care in those venues. How best can we address this problem?
And this is one I'm sure you'll want to comment on. Is there a problem with how we pay doctors in Canada? There's clearly an incentive for the quantity of patients that our GPs can see. It's obvious, when you go to the doctor's office. I have the utmost respect for our general practitioners, but the reality is that there are significant incentives to see 60 patients a day as opposed to 35. You see the signs up in the doctor's office: “One complaint only”. Hence, our wait times. It's no surprise that the same patient is back a week from then, because they've got only one complaint out and they had six.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the shortage of GPs, the difficulty getting in to see your GP. You're talking about empowering them. You talked about GPs doing diabetes education, for example. That probably takes an hour a patient.
How do you complete that circle?