If the Canada Health Act (CHA) becomes a political hot potato again, the CMA won't have to look far for advice on how to respond. Its new secretary general, Bill Tholl, was one of the 3 Health Canada personnel who helped craft the CHA, which has set the rules for Canada's medicare system for the past 16 years. Tholl, who left Health Canada in 1990 to become the CMA's director of health policy and economics, has been executive director at the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada since 1996. He returns to the CMA as its senior nonelected official Apr. 17. He is only the second nonphysician to hold the job in the CMA's 133-year history. “I see it as a vote of confidence in what I've done at the CMA and Heart and Stroke, ” he says.
About his new job, he adds: “I'm hopeful about the future for medicine, medicare and for health care. We just survived the black '90s, and they left medicare a severely traumatized patient. Two budgets ago we received stabilization of funding for health care, and then last September the Health Care Action Plan restored funding, with the CMA playing a critical role in both accomplishments. Now that the patient has been stabilized, we must transport medicare into the future and ensure that money invested in this patient is invested strategically.”
Tholl says improving professional unity is a key priority. “We have to overcome the real or perceived lack of common purpose between the CMA and its divisions. We have to get back to basics and establish a stronger sense that we are in this together.” He also thinks the CMA has become “unplugged” in terms of the opportunities presented by last September's federal-provincial health accord and the creation of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. “I want to work on getting us plugged in. You're going to see a lot more policy research that will allow us to take our messages to [Parliament] Hill and to Tunney's Pasture [Health Canada headquarters].”
As for the Canada Health Act, Tholl remains proud of his involvement. “I'm not saying it's perfect,” he says, “but the CHA guarantees that medicare's fundamentals are sound, and that fact helped shield MDs from the worst of the '90s recession.”
He replaces Dr. Peter Vaughan, who left the secretary general's job last year.