Prescription: Stick to inquiry issues

At the provincial inquiry into health-care queue jumping on Thursday, inquiry lawyer Michele Hollins asked Liberal Leader Dr. Raj Sherman if his occasional writing of prescriptions, diagnosing of politicians’ minor complaints and giving them medical advice in his office could be construed as queue jumping. Sherman denied it.

He is right to deny it. The reason it is not queue jumping is that Sherman is an emergency room physician. The colleagues who drop by his office to inquire about a sore throat, a sliver or skin rash would not be his patients outside the legislature because he is not a family doctor. Nor is he running a medical practice from his legislature office in which he is seeing regular patients and bumping them out of the way to make room for politician friends. He’s merely offering some minor medical help to colleagues as a professional courtesy during hours when he’s not practising medicine, but is serving as Liberal leader. Nor are these colleagues taking his time away from any emergency room duties.

Queue jumping in this instance would be if these same politicians butted their way to the head of the line at a family doctor’s office to have their boo-boos looked at ahead of other patients. As Sherman pointed out at the inquiry, all doctors get requests from family and friends for help. True enough, and this is no different.

Time for the inquiry to move on and deal with the real issues.