What we Heard: Scope of practice for health care professionals, improving substance use and mental health care

As part of our ongoing advocacy efforts, earlier this year Doctors of BC asked for your thoughts on three topics relevant to your work, and to the profession as a whole: scope of practice for health care professionals, substance use care, and mental health/mental illness care. Your responses will help to inform next steps on these topics, and ensure that we are positioned to effectively advocate on your behalf.

Scope of practice for health care professionals

We sought your input on a refresh of Doctors of BC's existing policy statement on scope of practice for health care professionals. Led by the Council on Health Economics and Policy (CHEP), this refresh aims to ensure that our policy position reflects your needs and concerns.

While scope of practice changes are a necessary component of the move toward team-based care, we recognize they may have broader implications for patients, other health care professionals – including doctors – and the broader health care system. Making these changes requires careful consideration to ensure that health system efficiency and patient safety are maintained.

We asked for your feedback on a draft set of policy principles on scope of practice expansions. These principles are the foundation of our advocacy with stakeholders on this issue, reflecting key considerations to guide decision-making and action.

• Feedback indicated that all the policy principles outlined for consideration were important.
• Ensuring patient safety, establishing and evaluating cost-effectiveness, addressing unintended impacts of expansions (e.g., increased paperwork, administrative tasks), and establishing adequate liability coverage for all parties in collaborative settings were also noted as important.

Read the full What We Heard report for more details.

Substance use care

Harmful substance use remains one of the most challenging public health crises in BC. While the provincial government and other partners have taken meaningful steps to address this issue, lowering the public health impact of harmful substance use remains an elusive goal – more must be done.

Doctors of BC’s Council on Health Promotion (COHP) is developing a policy paper designed to complement and modernize our position on substance use care, first developed and detailed in our 2009 policy paper, Stepping Forward: Improving Addiction Care in BC.

We sought your input to help us determine if we are on the right track with our core recommendations, and to better understand today’s gaps in substance use care training, resources, and other supports for physicians.

• 80% to 100% of respondents rated all our proposed recommendations as either “important” or “very important.”
• Feedback also identified the lack of access to appropriate care services for patients as a critical issue and highlighted the value in establishing a single, unified referral network for physicians to connect patients to appropriate care services.

Read the full What We Heard report for more details.

Mental health/mental illness care

With the rising prevalence of mental health issues in BC, there is a growing demand for care and services to meet a range of needs. COHP is in the preliminary stages of developing a policy statement that addresses the barriers and challenges of accessing mental health care and services in BC.

To better understand members’ clinical experience and perceptions of patient needs, we sought your input on five priority areas to inform where we will focus our policy and advocacy efforts.

• Respondents strongly agreed with our focus on the five identified priority areas.
• They also noted barriers to access, including identifying cost of services and gaps in integration as the top priority to address in work to improve the provision of mental health care in BC.

Read the full What We Heard report for more details.

We will continue to share further information on our policy development on these topics, including future engagement with members to support this.  If you have any questions, please contact View Email Addresspolicyandplanning@doctorsofbc.ca.