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Who is the best doctor? It is usually, quite simply, the doctor who listens — who has the time and the patience to listen to the patient. And Bill 20 will eviscerate this kind of communication, which will lead to error, which will not help anyone in Quebec save any money or any time.

I recently heard a wonderful, albeit harrowing lecture by the Harvard surgeon and award-winning writer Atul Gawande, whose most recent book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, I would love to see underlined from front to back on Gaétan Barrette’s night table.

In the talk, Gawande, who was chosen as last year’s BBC Reith lecturer (this was from the third lecture in the 2014 Reith series), explains how he was approached by the World Health Organization to study what could be done to reduce preventable complications during surgery. Gawande’s study found that in using simple techniques that upped the levels of communication between those in the operating scenario, the surgical complications rate was reduced by an average of 35%. Surgery-related fatalities fell by an average of 47%.

What Gawande’s team uncovered was that sometimes the most basic information was somehow not imparted or shared: what side of the body to perform surgery on; what the names and roles of all the people on the surgical team were; whether the patient being operated on was in fact the right patient.

These are not errors of individual ignorance or incompetence (say, that the surgeon didn’t know how to do the surgery), but errors that stem from problems in the system in which the doctors work. In the case of surgeons in a typical first-world hospital, the most routine tasks have become so labyrinthine and complicated that it’s become nearly impossible not to miss a step, leading to the most basic mistakes.

A family doctor’s office is not an operating room, but it is still a ground zero — where an unfolding medical narrative often begins. And so it’s no surprise that the Quebec Federation of General Practitioners has gone so far as to call the proposed reform a “toxic treatment,” and “a prescription that presents serious risks.”

They have not minced their words, but if Bill 20 passes, they will, god help the sick in this province, necessarily have to.