A8

By Jim Levine

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Speak Up

Recently we saw the appointment of another new health minister for the province of New Brunswick, the MLA from Quispamsis, Mary Schryer. As her predecessor Michael Murphy tried, so I'm sure will she, to infuse new life and efficiency into our province's delivery of health care services.

As always, there will be much written about the economics of the situation, and we will undoubtedly learn how certain things would be nice to have, but they cannot be made affordable. But as seniors, there is one thing our new minister could really help change and it really wouldn't cost an additional investment.

What we'd like to see is a system made more responsive to the feelings of the patients.

I know we are taught in this tough economic time to just be eternally gratefully if we have snagged a family doctor. I know if we go to the emergency ward of any hospital in the province and have to wait six or seven hours for care, we should still be grateful that we got seen at all and weren't sent a huge bill, thanking goodness for the graciousness of medicare.

I know we older people, who have held responsible positions, have helped build this province and set in motion events that encourage prosperity today. I know our generation should not mind if we have to sit in a doctor's waiting room for an appointment that was set for 2 p.m. and get seen at 5:10 p.m. In the doctor's eyes, their work is much more important than our time ... after all, we're retired. But I'm not willing to accept that, and neither are a lot of older people who talk to me.

One of the most eloquent proponents of a new system where the patient's worth and time is considered of equal importance to the doctor's is Rita Charon, author of an amazing book called Narrative Medicine. Her point is that we learn from hearing each other's stories, and the doctor who listens to the story of the patient can learn much to lead to a successful diagnosis and treatment.

A physician herself, Charon writes that: "Patients long for doctors who comprehend what they go through and who, as a result, stay the course with them through their illnesses. A medicine practiced without a genuine and obligating awareness of what patients go through may fulfill its technical goals, but it is an empty medicine, or, at best, half a medicine."

Charon says our generation longs for a medicine different from the current fragmented bureaucracy that health care has become. She argues that as importantly as money and machinery, time is the irreplaceable ingredient in the healing relationship: time to listen, time to recognize, time to care.

It is important, as we grow older and sometimes encounter health problems, that we not be treated as a stereotypical group, or as drains on the system. Just as important as prescribing medicine is understanding that the identity of a person is not determined by the state of his or her body.

Charon suggests that the experience of time might be one of the most telling aspects of the divide between the sick and the well.

I readily acknowledge there are many doctors who have well-organized waiting rooms and rarely keep patients waiting. But for every one of these wonderful gems, there is the emergency room experience so many of us have encountered, or the over-booked specialist who eats up most of one of the few days we may have left.

Our new health minister has much on her plate. But if I may suggest, an addition to it would be a cultural change that would see health professionals urgently examine and make a stab at imagining a sense of how their patients might experience time.

* Jim Levine's column discusses seniors and their lifestyles, looking at traditional and non-traditional issues.