The Liberal government signalled some new health-care priorities in the speech from the throne, including reducing specialist wait times and corralling health-care administrators' compensation.
The Ontario government announced plans to take further steps to reduce the wait times patients face in seeing a specialist in Ontario — and Health Minister Eric Hoskins said that means centralizing the specialist referral system, following a strategy that the province has used with its low back pain strategy.
"Where an individual has been assessed as in need of seeing a specialist for back pain, there's a centralized process they go through," he said. "I expect it will be different for different specialties and we're working with specialties to get a better understanding of what the impediments are and to streamline it."
In other news for specialists, the throne speech also contained a sign that the government plans to continue to take a hard line on physician compensation.
The government "believes that additional resources for health care should be directed where they will help patients most, at the front line — not only to the highest-billing physicians or highly paid administrators," the speech stated.
Hoskins said the government still believes its last offer to doctors — the tentative Physician Services Agreement that was supported by the Ontario Medical Association but voted down by doctors — was a fair one.
"We have a responsibility to continue to manage the health-care system and make continued investments in home and community care, in our nurses, in our hospitals, so we'll take that responsibility to move forward," Hoskins said.
Increases to the Physician Services Budget will be spent on "supporting family doctors" and 800 to 900 new doctors, but not raises to compensation for high-billing specialists, and Hoskins isn't ruling out taking unilateral actions to achieve those goals.
The throne speech's reference to "highly paid administrators" speaks to a concern voiced by some doctors that too much of the health-care budget goes to compensation in the bureaucracy.
According to Hoskins, the Ministry of Health and the Treasury Board have been in communication with the health-care management sector to make it aware of the government's new expectations concerning a framework for executive compensation in the Local Health Integration Networks, the soon-to-be defunct Community Care Access Centres, and hospitals.

Throne Speech 2016: Health-care priorities include centralizing specialist wait times

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