OMA Spotlight on Health

OMA Spotlight on Health – André Picard

October 18, 2021 Ontario Medical Association
OMA Spotlight on Health
OMA Spotlight on Health – André Picard
Show Notes Transcript

In latest OMA podcast, award-winning journalist André Picard discusses covering the pandemic

 

Globe and Mail columnist André Picard has been given an honorary membership to the OMA for his coverage of the pandemic. In the OMA’s regular podcast series Spotlight on Health, Picard shares his views on the pandemic from his vantage point as a journalist.

 

Read more about Picard’s honorary membership here: https://www.oma.org/newsroom/news/2021/may/ontario-medical-association-gives-globe-columnist-andre-picard-honorary-membership/

OMA Spotlight on Health - André Picard 8

 

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Georgia Balogiannis: In this podcast the Ontario Medical Association looks at current issues of interest in health care. Spotlight on Health gives you all the straight talk. We're Ontario's doctors and your health matters to us. I'm Georgia Balogiannis 

for the Ontario Medical Association. 

 

Globe and Mail columnist André Picard recently received honourary membership to the Ontario Medical Association in recognition of decades of health-care coverage. In this episode, he discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

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André Picard: COVID has really been, for journalists, a story of a lifetime. So, it's really interesting, it's professionally rewarding, but it'd be personally difficult. You know, I think it's demanding for journalists, but not in the same way as it is for — for others, for essential workers, like health-care professionals. So, everybody has different kind of demands during the pandemic. 

 

I was thinking the other day, I had an uncle who during the Second World War reported from the frontlines. He wasn't a journalist, he was, essentially, a propagandist for the army. But he was still up there. And he always said, "You know, I was happy to be carrying a typewriter instead of a gun." But then he would always add, "But then I was really happy that there were other people with guns in front of me."

 

And that's kind of how I feel as a journalist. We're up there, but there's all these other people doing way more important work in front of us, and we're thankful for it.

 

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André Picard: I was really honoured to get this honorary membership in the Ontario Medical Association. It's very touching recognition. And I was thinking, if I got the opportunity to speak — we can't do any of this stuff during COVID — I would have talked about how the pandemic has really exposed what doctors really do. And I always come back to this famous quote from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, "The first task of the doctor is political, the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad policy." 

 

And I think, to me, that's one of the most striking things during the pandemic, especially in Ontario. We've seen some horribly bad policy inflicted on Ontarians by the government, and the only people there at the front lines helping them out were the doctors, and using their voices really powerfully to rail against bad policy. So, to me, that was really important. That, to me, was medicine at its finest. It really saves lives as much as the hands-on medicine does every day. 

 

People have really shown what we like to use in French, the word “solidarité” – you know, they've really come together. Most people have put aside their personal interests and acted in the benefit of the collectivity.  

 

So, everyone has made sacrifices big and small. And that's impressive. And I think it helped us, they could have been much, much worse if people were much more like Americans — not to point fingers south — but you know, just acting selfishly. And we didn't see a lot of that in Canada, so I think that's amazing.

 

I think the other thing I really appreciated is that citizens and voters saw the benefits of science-informed policymaking, and they embraced the science. They listened to physicians, they listened to experts. Even when they didn't like what they heard, they tended to listen to them. 

 

So, that I think gives us hope, and I hope they'll appreciate that going forward, as I — I mentioned earlier, that they'll see medicine as more than just what happens on Grey's Anatomy. You know, it's not all about fixing boo-boo's and surgery. It's about some everyday stuff, making life better for citizens and making demands for better policy and so on. 

 

So, I think we all made some sacrifices big and small, and they've paid off, and I hope people recognize that it was worth it.

 

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André Picard: There's no question that the health-care system changed quite dramatically during the pandemic – some of it good, some of it bad. The good thing for me is that our hospitals did exceptionally well. I don't think people recognize just how well we did. We had virtually no outbreaks in hospitals, they never were overwhelmed, even with overwhelming numbers of ICU. It was unthinkable that we could have 800, 850 people in ICU in the province and survive, and nobody died because of lack of care. And that's a tremendous accomplishment in itself. 

 

I think another obvious one is we embraced digital health. Telemedicine really has become the norm over the last year, and I hope that we really hang on to that. I hope we hang on to the good of it but recognize that there are limits to it that sometimes people have to be seen. I think we made at least 10, 20 years of advance on telemedicine within a few months. So, that's great. 

 

Again, this recognition of the importance of the social determinants of health, that's become sort of part of our daily discussions in public policy, and that's great. This recognition that it's not just about medicine, it's about making sure people have a decent income and a roof over their heads. Because we saw who suffered during the pandemic — it was frail elders, it was people living in homelessness, racialized workers — and we need policies that address that. It's not enough to just do sickness care, we have to do health care.

 

So, I think there are really some really important lessons for the health system in this. And I — I hope we don't forget them too quickly. 

 

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André Picard: I think the health system can always get better. There's no question we learned about some of the weaknesses — the most glaring one, of course, was in long-term care. We just saw a horrible massacre of older people in institutional care. The way that hospitals did well, it really made how badly long-term care homes did look so much worse. I think we have to fix that. We have to remember that our health system is not just hospitals. 

 

I think, too, we have to worry about the collateral damage of the pandemic. My greatest worry coming out of this is the mental health impact. This is collective trauma that's been going on for a long time for many, many months. And especially on frontline workers, on health-care workers. I really worry that we're going to lose thousands and thousands of personal support workers and nurses and physicians who are just burned out and just can't do it anymore. I think that's a real worry. 

 

So, we have to really pay attention to that human resource piece of the puzzle, the post-traumatic stress part of the puzzle — we really have to focus a lot of attention there. So, I hope that we don't just immediately go back to the so-called “normal.” I think there's a lot of people just want to forget this and move on. But I hope we really learned the lessons from this and the pandemic, that we can do things better, we can do things differently. 

 

We did some tremendous advances during this pandemic, just because we were forced to, and I hope we hang on to them, that we don't lose it. They often say that a pandemic is a terrible thing to waste. And we have to remember that lesson, that some good can come of this. We can't allow it to be otherwise.

 

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Georgia Balogiannis: This podcast is brought to you by the Ontario Medical Association and is edited and produced by Jodi Crawford Productions. I'm Georgia Balogiannis, Director of Member Editorial Communications at the Ontario Medical Association. To learn more about the Ontario Medical Association, please visit oma.org

 

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