Re: The crisis that COVID-19 exposed, highlighted, and worsened (but did not cause)

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 64, No. 4, May 2022, Page 151 Letters
By: Neil Finnie, MD

I read with pleasure Dr Brian Day’s lament about the mounting inadequacies of the hospital, physician, and nursing sectors over recent decades [BCMJ 2022;64:53-54]. The burning reality in BC, and certainly in Victoria, is the astonishing deficiency of family doctors, which has resulted in more than 750 000 individuals across the province finding basic health care to be inaccessible. Yet nobody is doing much about it.

The recent BC budget failed to immediately increase funding for family doctors’ low fees. Were there supplemental overhead cost allowances? Was there an enthusiastic endorsement for a realistic alternative to the fee-for-service salary structure? Could an obligation be created for medical schools to channel and support students entering family medicine residencies? How does our BC government justify collecting taxes to support medical services that are simply unavailable? We seem to have few answers that satisfy.
—Neil Finnie, MD (retired)
Victoria

This letter was submitted in response to “The crisis that COVID-19 exposed, highlighted, and worsened (but did not cause).”

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Neil Finnie, MD. Re: The crisis that COVID-19 exposed, highlighted, and worsened (but did not cause). BCMJ, Vol. 64, No. 4, May, 2022, Page(s) 151 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply