Ontario to eliminate sick note requirement for short absences

Article content

TORONTO – Ontario will eliminate sick note requirements for short absences as part of a larger effort to ease the administrative burden on doctors, the province’s health minister said Wednesday.

The province will soon introduce legislation that, if passed, will no longer allow employers to require a sick note from a doctor during the three days of provincially protected sick leave to which workers are entitled.

Article content

Article content

Employers will retain the right to require another form of proof from an employee, such as a certificate or receipt for over-the-counter medications, the Labor Minister’s office said.

“These changes are designed to reduce the bureaucratic burden on sick workers and healthcare professionals, while maintaining accountability in the workplace,” said Zoe Knowles, spokesperson for David Piccini.

The province is also expanding a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to summarize or transcribe conversations with patients to more than 150 primary care providers, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said.

“Together, these changes put patients before paperwork, allowing physicians to spend more time with their patients, resulting in a more connected and convenient patient care experience,” he said.

A patient must give doctors consent to use the AI-based transcription program, Jones said, adding that early results from the program called “AI scribe” are promising.

“Anecdotally, we hear that patients really appreciate it and doctors find that they spend more time face-to-face with their patients rather than staring at a computer screen,” Jones said.

Article content

The province will study the issue to determine its effect on the administrative burden on doctors.

“AI is a new frontier with great potential to reduce administrative burden, but we need to test this technology,” said Ontario Medical Association President Andrew Park.

Doctors welcome the government initiatives, Park said.

Doctors spend almost as much time in front of a computer as they do with patients, he said. The paperwork burden is unnecessary and generates an average of “an alarming 19 hours of physician time per week,” she said.

“It prevents them from visiting patients or achieving a healthy work-life balance, or in most cases, both,” he said.

OntarioMD, a subsidiary of OMA, will run the transcription program, Jones said.

Doctors and the province are also working together to streamline and simplify 12 government medical forms.

The sick leave policy announced Wednesday is a setback for Doug Ford’s government.

Kathleen Wynne’s previous Liberal government removed sick leave requirements under the Employment Standards Act.

The Progressive Conservatives then repealed that provision with Bill 47 in 2018, which allowed employers to “require evidence of entitlement to leave that is reasonable under the circumstances.”

Article content

Eliminating sick leave requirements for short absences is a no-brainer, said Adil Shamji, a liberal lawmaker and emergency room doctor.

“I think it’s very reasonable, in fact appropriate, not to go to a family doctor or primary care doctor just to get documentation,” Shamji said.

More attention should be paid to the “onerous” burden of filling out short-term disability forms, Shamji said.

But Shamji warned against artificial intelligence becoming a panacea for note-taking.

“A pilot project is not going to solve the crisis we face,” he said.

The College of Family Physicians of Ontario says 2.3 million Ontarians do not have a primary care doctor and that number is expected to double in two years.

The administrative burden is one of the problems that is driving doctors away, several medical organizations have said.

Article content