2002

So where do we go from here? The current duo of health ministers have come to realize that they are as unable to control the economic drivers of health care costs as the past six or seven incumbents. I’m sure that informing the decision-makers that they shouldn’t agree to pay the McEachern arbitration award because they were broke was difficult for the new economic advisers.

In May of this year the government and the physicians of British Columbia engaged in a very nasty altercation to try to settle the fee dispute for the province’s doctors. It was obvious that this compensation package—as well as that of the nurses, the HEU, and health care spending in general—threatened one day to engulf the whole provincial budget.

This is part 2 of two on the enigma of whiplash, which in the meantime is still an enigma.

Difficult and often dramatized, the subject of medical error was once again in the spotlight thanks to the 2000 report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System from the US Institute of Medicine.

The international literature on medical error is extensive. A recent search of the MEDLINE database found that 6000 of 35 000 journal articles published in the past 5 years were focused on this topic.

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