Why a top B.C. heart surgeon quit for politics
Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi was more frustrated than usual. The pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon and former chief of cardiac surgery at BC Children’s Hospital had just spent a shift in the midst of an unrelenting respiratory illness season. In between caring for his most urgent patients, he’d had to inform some parents their children’s non-emergency surgeries were being postponed yet again.
When the BC Greens announced Gandhi would join their party as a deputy leader late last month, it was easy to draw a line backwards to Gandhi’s many critical comments that resulted in at least two emails of reprimand he shared on Twitter on Jan. 19. Gandhi’s last day of employment with BC Children’s was Dec. 31, 2022. The son of two small-town family doctors in Nova Scotia remains a clinical professor at the University of British Columbia.
Since being recruited to BC Children’s in 2010, Gandhi says the health authority instructed him multiple times not to speak publicly when media requested his insight on virtually any health-care issue. BCCH does make experts it employs available to media, Virani wrote, through a “robust communications process” to determine who has the best expertise to speak.
Now he turns to politics to tackle what ails B.C.’s health system. “Two years ago, I never would have thought I wouldn’t be a heart surgeon,” said Gandhi. As last fall’s respiratory virus surge hammered children’s hospitals across Canada, Gandhi was operating as much as he could while planning to curtail his practice after giving one year’s notice in January 2022, per his contract. Another cardiothoracic surgeon was hired in July 2022 to replace Gandhi, and BCCH is in the process of hiring another full-service surgeon who can perform heart transplants, Virani said.
“We do not postpone surgeries that are determined to be medically urgent or emergent,” he wrote. “Decisions on surgical postponement are not taken lightly and are absolutely done in full consultation with the most responsible surgeon based upon patient urgency and complexity.” At one point, he says he suggested the family of a child whose essential surgery had been pushed for months connect with an acquaintance who could put them in touch with the media. Gandhi felt it was the last avenue to get the boy’s surgery scheduled soon. “I felt powerless,” he said.“We know that any delay in surgical care is difficult and can cause worry for patients and their families,” wrote Virani.
A recently announced increased payment model to retain and support primary care physicians in B.C., Gandhi said, is a good start on primary, community-based medicine. But he is concerned it does not include metrics to measure its success at attaching patients to doctors and attracting more to B.C.
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