How many abortions are done in doctor's offices?

Suzanne Fortin tells us that an Ottawa abortion clinic has been closed.

Good.

This from the Ottawa Sun:
"The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario forced the Dr. Wee-Lim Sim Medical Practice at 371 Friel St. to stop doing therapeutic abortions after the inspection.

In a July 2011 report, college inspectors wrote that the clinic wasn’t using the “minimum expected standard” of anesthetic for the procedures.

Inspectors also noted a lack of procedure manuals, fire code compliance, safety standards, control over drugs and monitoring equipment."

But here's the thing. That is one doctor's office, in one city, in one province, in Canada. How many other doctor's offices in Canada are also doing abortions, and how many abortions are they doing? We don't know. We do know that CIHI doesn't give us any statistics on these abortions done in private physician's offices. We also know that there were 18,330 of these abortions done in private physician's offices in 2010 (based on a freedom of information request of OHIP billings), and that these numbers are not reported in CIHI's statistics.

So how could this be changed to get more accurate numbers? Well, if CIHI would start basing their statistics on hospital billing records instead of their current method (1). If they made this change, our abortion numbers in Canada would be a lot closer to the true numbers of abortions performed in Canada. And that would be a very good thing.

But CIHI says they can't do that because:
"using fee-for-service (FFS) payments to produce more comprehensive induced abortion statistics at the national level. Our study revealed that the use of FFS payments for induced abortions varies significantly across the provinces and territories; thus this data would not allow CIHI to produce a pan-Canadian comparable series of statistics."

To be honest with you, I'm not exactly sure why this is the case. Couldn't they simply do what I did in Ontario, and ask all the Provincial Ministries of Health to provide them with the numbers of abortions performed in hospitals, clinics and private physician's offices, all based on billing records? If I could do it in Ontario (at least before the Liberals secretly shut it all down), surely it could be done in every province, right? Then we would have a much better idea of the numbers of abortions done each year.

And as an added bonus, all those clinics that don't report their abortion, their data would also now be captured too.

Seems to me if there's a will, there's a way.

1) http://www.cihi.ca/CIHI-ext-portal/pdf/internet/TA_10_ALLDATATABLES20120417_EN
"CIHI captures administrative, clinical and demographic data on induced abortions performed in acute care, day surgery and emergency departments in Canadian hospitals. Data is supplied by provincial and territorial ministries of health, hospitals and independent abortion clinics in Canada. The figures in the following tables include induced abortions performed in a hospital or clinic setting in Canada.

CIHI has explored using fee-for-service (FFS) payments to produce more comprehensive induced abortion statistics at the national level. Our study revealed that the use of FFS payments for induced abortions varies significantly across the provinces and territories; thus this data would not allow CIHI to produce a pan-Canadian comparable series of statistics.

As a result, CIHI will continue to report on induced abortions performed in hospitals and abortion clinics only. While this is probably an underestimate of induced abortions done in the country, it is currently the best way to produce pan-Canadian comparable data."