July

There is increasing evidence that the health care system is less responsive to the needs of immigrants and ethno-cultural communities than to other Canadians. Systemic barriers to access can be seen at every level of the health care structure: lack of linguistically appropriate services; predominantly homogenous staff and management; lack of proactive policy and programs and services based upon demographics that are no longer accurate.

Thank you [Dr Oetter] for your timely piece “Licensing of foreign-trained physicians” in the April issue (BCMJ 2005;3:125). A version prepared for the press would do much to defuse the emotional treatment this topic receives in the media.

The passport office has recently insisted that I hand write the office address, instead of using a stamp. They claim they cannot read stamps at times. They haven’t seen my handwriting! They said they had been letting this slide but were now enforcing handwritten addresses. Ours is long and involves suite numbers, etc.

Many family doctors recently attended the BCMA-sponsored Professional Quality Improvement Days (PQIDs). It seems the health care system is currently having some difficulty meeting the expectations, costs, and demands placed upon it. These demands are generally accepted as programmed inevitably to increase, due to our aging and increasing population, and new expensive investigative, therapeutic, and pharmacological technology.

There were two aspects of the PQIDs that were particularly discouraging:

Book review

Computerization and Going Paperless in Canadian Primary Care. By Nicola T. Shaw. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1-85775-623-1. Paperback, 288 pages. $53.50.

Dr Nicola Shaw is a research scientist at the Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Improvement at the University of British Columbia. This book is based on a similar publication that was published in the UK in 2001 and has been adapted with significant research for the Canadian primary care setting.