I thank you all on behalf of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, which represents our 6,000 members Canada-wide, for this opportunity to offer our rationale and practical application of how we can help decrease cost to the Canadian health sector and reduce patient load on general and family practitioners as well as neuro and orthopedic specialists.
Our distributed document touches on issues challenging our increased utilization and on studies rationalizing our cost-effectiveness and efficiencies at treating neuro-musculoskeletal conditions. Now, that's a bit of a mouthful, but in plain language we speak of back pain, neck pain, and headache. Further detail on any of the materials referenced is certainly available upon request.
I'd like to elaborate on two or three items mentioned in our document, as this may lay the foundation for further discussion.
I'm an Alberta practitioner; thus, I am more familiar with Alberta models of care. The simplest, most straightforward example of chiropractors' cost-efficiencies and treatment effectiveness comes from our Workers' Compensation Board model. In short, chiropractic care gets workers back on the job more quickly and more cost-efficiently than any other health care provider, period. Couple this with the Health Quality Council of Alberta survey last year, which related patient satisfaction to chiropractic care at 90%, second only to pharmacists' services.
Workers' Compensation Board experiences in other provinces emulate the Alberta experience; thus it's a common example across the country.
An example not so common, again from Alberta, is the national spine care initiative, in conjunction with the University of Calgary, which sees a team of chiropractic, physiotherapy, and physiatry triaging for neurosurgeons. Simply put, the quicker back pain—and any health care consideration, for that matter—is diagnosed and directed to the most appropriate health care giver, the better the outcome, be that direction to conservative care, namely chiropractic or physiotherapy or strengthening and work hardening processes, or direction to surgery. It's a matter of the right treatment at the right time for the right reason.
This kind of model, using the low-tech, comparatively low-cost diagnostic skills of chiropractors, is of significant cost-benefit to the system. Chiropractors are highly trained health care providers with the ability to diagnose. Thus, not only are we effective at treating, but we're vastly underutilized at directing traffic.
This is slowly changing, in fairness, and just recently—this past month as a matter of fact—one of our chiropractic researchers with a research chair at Mount Sinai Hospital was indeed given treatment privileges at this hospital, but patients pay personally for those services. That stated, we run into barriers. The Canada Health Act sees that all dollars go to the medical model, and it should be no surprise to anyone around this table that the medical model needs help and not just in terms of more doctors or more dollars. Utilization of a host of low-tech highly skilled health care givers such as nurse practitioners, physiotherapists, physiatrists, psychologists, and chiropractic doctors with diagnostic capabilities could be more fully utilized, to economic and manpower advantage to our health care sector.
Thus, the point we wish to leave with you today, and discuss with you, is that we could decrease cost to Canada's health sector by reducing the physical load on medical colleagues by taking on a sizeable portion of their practices that deal with musculoskeletal conditions, roughly 30% of their workload. Finally, we feel that barriers should be reduced, preferably removed, for those population bases, namely low socio-economic status folks, Department of National Defence members, and first nations people, who find difficulty if not absolute downright impossibility accessing chiropractic care.
I thank you.