What Are The Issues Facing Medicine? CMA Seeking Member Help To Set Annual Meeting Agenda

The CMA wants to hear from its 72,000-plus members about the issues they think should be debated during the association’s 143rd annual meeting in Niagara Falls, Ont., this August.

Meeting organizers have posted a member survey that offers a list of 12 potential topics for debate during the three-day meeting. Physicians have until noon on Jan. 18 to provide their first three choices.Potential topics include:

• How can Canada encourage people to assume personal responsibility for their health. Should incentives such as tax credits for supervised weight-loss programs be considered?
• With health care spending about to hit “the wall” at which it accounts for 50% of program spending at the provincial and territorial level, what steps can be taken to ensure the timely provision of care? For instance, should health care premiums be considered?
• Is the patient-physician relationship at risk? What can the medical profession do to strengthen this relationship?
• What can the medical profession and organized medicine do to improve the health status of vulnerable populations, such as homeless Canadians?

The CMA has been making member input part of its annual meeting planning since 2004, and the initiative is growing in popularity. By Jan. 12, with six days still to go, more than 580 members had completed the 2010 survey. This surpassed the final total of 575 responses achieved in 2009.

The annual meeting brings together roughly 300 physicians, residents and medical students from every part of Canada. They form General Council, one of the CMA’s two major policy-making bodies.

Forward any comments about this article to: cmanews[at]cma.ca