TORONTO - Former British Health Minister Frank Dobson is warning Canadian politicians not to embrace private clinics in their efforts to reduce surgical wait times.
Dobson says Britain's National Health Service saw administrative costs jump from four per cent to 15 per cent when it switched from global hospital budgets to a system of paying set amounts for each procedure, such as a cataract operation or knee surgery.
He says allowing private clinics to do select operations to lower wait times only hurts the public health system, which is left to deal with the most seriously ill patients at a much greater cost.
Dobson says Canadian politicians should be careful about proceeding further with private clinics because the result has proved to be very unpopular in Great Britain.
The Ontario Health Coalition, which is sponsoring Dobson's visit to Canada, says most of the restructuring of the way hospital services are delivered is being done under the radar.
It says the wait-times strategy is being used to allow more private delivery of surgical procedures, and warns that the public health-care system could be the loser in the long run.
Dobson said the change to procedure-based pricing drove the NHS to over spend its budget last year, resulting in hospital closures in some communities and nationwide protests.
"Eight members of the (Labour) government have been parading outside their local hospitals . . .and that includes two or three cabinet ministers protesting against the local impact of the national polices that they subscribed to," Hudson told a news conference at the Ontario legislature.
