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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Viewpoints ID: #63253 Hard Splitting the Surgical Week

Read the following editorial from a website.

Surgical waiting lists in this province have become a fact of life that nobody should accept. A hip replacement that once took four months now takes more than a year in several regions. This month the health ministry asked for views on letting specialists work part of the week in private clinics while keeping their hospital posts, a practice known as dual practice. We believe the proposal has earned a careful trial rather than a sweeping change, and in our view the safeguards matter far more than the label.

Dr. Delphina Wyatt, an orthopaedic surgeon, argues that the waste is in plain sight. “Operating rooms go dark by six o’clock while patients wait in pain,” she told members of the legislature. She would cap each surgeon’s private hours and require every participating doctor to keep taking public on-call shifts, and she insists that emergency and cancer care stay entirely public. Ulric Mortimer, who studies fairness in health systems, warns that the caps are the weak point. In countries he has studied, he says, surgeons who could earn more privately let their public lists slide, even when the rules said otherwise. He would pay for extra evening shifts in public hospitals before opening any private lane.

Matilda Poitras, who plans hospital budgets for the health ministry, says the real issue is how contracts are written. She notes that the province already pays private clinics for some cataract surgeries, so the line between public and private is not as clean as either side suggests. She would accept the change only if clinics report their public and private hours every month and pay automatic penalties when public waits get worse. Kavya Varma, a patient navigator at a large hospital, says patients need plain rules on what they can and cannot pay for. She also wants a place for them to complain if a doctor steers them toward a private booking.

We favour a limited trial. Our province should test dual practice in one region for two years, using the monthly reports and penalties Poitras describes, and it should fund Mortimer’s evening shifts in the same region so that we can compare the two approaches. Wyatt’s promise to keep emergency and cancer care public belongs in law, not in a policy manual. Every patient should receive Varma’s plain rules before booking anything. If public waits in the trial region rise, we would end the experiment.

Using the drop-down menu (▾), choose the best option according to the information given on the website.

This editorial is mainly about 1.
.

Who most clearly doubts that limits on private hours would protect public lists? 2.
.

Matilda Poitras’s position would most likely be supported by 3.
.

What outcome does Dr. Delphina Wyatt’s condition call for? 4.
.

The editorial’s main purpose is to 5.
.

The following is a comment by a visitor to the website page. Complete the comment by choosing the best option to fill in each blank.

My brother-in-law is a family doctor in Moncton, and he sent me this editorial with three question marks in the subject line. Dr. Wyatt says operating rooms go dark by 6.
, which shocked both of us. The fairness researcher would rather pay for 7.
 before any private lane opens, and that sounds like the cheaper first step. The ministry planner would make clinics report 8.
, though I wonder who will read those reports. Numbers only help if someone outside the ministry checks them, and my brother-in-law says nobody checks the forms his clinic already files. Kavya Varma wants every patient to receive 9.
 before booking anything. It startled me that a hip replacement now takes 10.
 in some regions, and that figure alone explains why this debate will not go away.

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