The president of the Canadian Medical Association broke tradition last week by letting us in on two words that, he said, should get the attention of everyone who uses our health care system.

By Peter Stockland November 24, 2014

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Hospitals are invariably opaque environments where mere mortals are always encouraged to sit quietly without fussing to understand what is self-evidently beyond their ken.

But the president of the Canadian Medical Association broke with saw-bones tradition last week by letting us in on two words that, he said, should get the attention of everyone who uses our health care system.

Those words, Dr. Christopher Simpson said, are “code gridlock.” They are used internally to signify local conditions in a particular hospital. But they are also five-alarm symptoms of the emergency condition in which all of public medicine finds itself, Simpson said.

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