Ontario Medical Association needs to get its act together

What the heck is going on with the Ontario Medical Association?

That’s the question every Ontario resident should ask the next time they see a doctor in this province.

For the last three years, the association that represents the 31,000 practising doctors in Ontario has been ravaged with internal warfare, nasty scandals, a bitter divorce by specialists and a voting system considered a sham.

At best, the OMA is highly dysfunctional.

At worst, its credibility is shot — and it now risks losing the confidence of the patients that its members serve.

In what could be their last real chance to restore the associations’s reputation, OMA leaders will hold a critical meeting Nov. 22-24 in Toronto. At the meeting, the OMA’s powerful governing council will address everything from how doctors elect their president to how to deal with angry splinter groups and contentious provincial legislation designed to tighten oversight of doctors’ OHIP billings.

It’s been a long slog for the OMA. The chaos started in earnest in late 2016 when activist doctors, upset with the association’s handling of payment negotiations with the then-Liberal government, began a campaign to oust the OMA leadership. In February 2017, the entire executive team, including president Dr. Virginia Walley, resigned en masse.

Within months of a new activist-led leadership team assuming power, more trouble erupted, with some activist executive members resigning and OMA staff and doctors being subjected to vicious abuse online and by phone.

And last May, in what was described by former OMA president Dr. Doug

Weir as “a disastrous precedence,” the OMA council elected a new president despite the fact that the broader membership voted for another doctor to be president.

The turmoil appears endless. Just this week, Dr. Sohail Gandhi, the current OMA president, took on the Ford government for introducing Bill 138 that aims at improving oversight of OHIP billings.

Gandhi told QP Briefing, a daily newsletter on provincial affairs, that while opposing the main elements of the bill, doctors “will always support a fair and transparent process for reviewing how funds are spent by the government on medical care, including on physicians’ billings.”

At the coming meeting in Toronto, the most pressing issue for the 260-member governing council will be to fix the way doctors elect the OMA president. Last spring, in a membership-wide referendum, Dr. Hirotaka Yamashiro, a respected Toronto pediatrician, was chosen as president-elect. The referendum was non-binding on the governing council, which had the ultimate role in selecting the president.

But in a stunning move that made a mockery of the referendum, the council chose Dr. Samantha Hill, a well-regarded Toronto cardiac surgeon who finished second in the referendum, as president-elect. Critics claimed the council, which is heavily influenced by doctors representing high-billing specialties, opted for one of their own instead of a candidate from a lower-billing section.

Granted, most doctors and patients don’t understand — or even care about — the OMA’s inner workings. But it’s important that they do because the OMA is involved in everything from setting doctors’ fees to long-range health-care planning. That’s why it’s critical the OMA gets its act together — and soon.