Can Wait Times for Hip Replacements in Canada be Shortened?

 Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.  I spent my life teaching actuarial science at a university. As a result, I calculated lots of numbers:  averages, expected values, variances. But, they were only numbers. What I didn’t see was the individual human story behind each calculation. But now that I am the

Three Things Everyone Should Know About Autism in Canada

 Canadian governments have done little to address the crisis faced by autism families across the country. This sentiment was true in 2007 when it was put forward in the cross-party Senate report on the state of funding for the treatment of autism in Canada, aptly titled, Pay Now or Pay

Four Things We Can Do to Improve Healthcare in Canada

 What’s next for primary care? Healthcare is the purview of the provinces in Canada, but health leadership–setting big picture goals, helping achieve best practices across the country and providing long-term, sustainable funding models–is the role of the federal government. As the federal election campaign wages, Canadians should be pressing federal

What I Learned as a Medical Student Working with Low-Income Families in Toronto

 Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. As a medical student taking part in a Social Paediatrics course at The Hospital for Sick Children, I was recently immersed in the lives and healthcare needs of low-income families in Toronto. This experience reshaped the lens through which I now view healthcare and helped

Does Canada Have Enough Money to Fund Senior Care?

 Will the cost of senior care in Canada one day break the bank?  Probably not, contrary to common perceptions. Four health policy experts, Dr. Robyn Tamblyn, Dr. Ivy Bourgeault , Dr. Neena Chappell and Dr Michel Grignon explain why money is not the biggest issue when talking about senior care

An Era of Restraint in Health Care Spending in Canada

 The question is whether the current decline represents a permanent bending of the health care cost curve or a temporary pause In the wake of new health expenditure data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the evidence continues to mount that Canadian public health expenditure growth is moderating.

Private Delivery of Healthcare Can Work in a Publically Funded System but Comes with Risks

 What the rest of Canada can learn from Alberta’s experience If you look at an old map of Canadian healthcare policy, just near Privatization Island is a big warning: “Here be dragons.” So it proved for Alberta Health Services last month when a seemingly innocuous decision—to swap the tender for

Canada Relying too Heavily on Unpaid Caregivers—At a Cost

 Almost half a million Canadians go without necessary homecare. The unexpected and largely unreported good news about homecare in this country is that the vast majority of Canadians who receive home help or homecare for a chronic health condition are getting all the services they need. According to a recently

Canada Slow to Respond to Prescription Opioid Crisis

 In my first career as a pharmacist, I worked in more than 30 pharmacies across Nova Scotia, filling more than 100,000 prescriptions between 1990 and 1995. Some of these were for strong painkillers called opioids--drugs like morphine and oxycodone, which are chemically and biologically very similar to heroin. Back then,

How a National Drug Plan Can Boost the Canadian Economy

 Canadians pay among the highest costs per capita among OECD countries for prescription drugs, with one Canadian out of 10 unable to fill their prescriptions because of financial reasons. According to the recently released study A Roadmap to a Rational Pharmacare Policy in Canada, commissioned by the Canadian Federation of Nurses

Why We Need to Rethink the Nursing Home Model

 We don’t need more nursing home “beds,” we need more care options so people have choices How many nursing beds are needed in Canada to care for frail, elderly people with high care needs? That’s a question that policy makers across the country are grappling with, given the aging population

Most Medications Prescribed to Children Have Not Been Adequately Studied

 Canada is falling behind other countries on drug safety for children The development of new therapies has provided our health care system with enormous advances, such as insulin for diabetes, antibiotics for infections or chemotherapy for many cancers.  Yet these therapies may also cause potential harm, even death, so the

Why Medical Tourism is Not the Answer

 Medical tourism is not a ‘cash cow’ but a ‘many-headed Hydra’ So it looks like the ‘magic bullet’ solution has been found at last to cure Canada’s health care woes: medical tourism.  Last week, Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital defended its position to court affluent medical patients from other countries who can

Reducing Obesity: It Takes a Village

 An interview with Canada’s Dr. Yoni Freedhoff During my recent visit to Canada, I had a chance to meet Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity expert for EvidenceNetwork.ca and an assistant professor in family medicine at the University of Ottawa. He is also the founder and medical director of Canada's Bariatric

When Health Services Harm More Than Help

 The dangers of overdiagnosis “First, do no harm,” as suggested by Hippocrates, is a vital principle that should always guide physicians, but they are also well aware that in modern health care, whether in the form of drugs, operations, radiotherapy or any other form of treatment, there is always the

The Great Canadian Experiment to House the Homeless

 That health is more than health care was a point I heard many times on my recent Fulbright fellowship visit to Canada. Right now in the U.S., you'd never know that though, what with all the hullaballoo over dysfunctional websites and failed efforts to get more people covered by insurance.

What the Future of American Health Care Means for Canada

 Will Obamacare impact Canadian health care policy? It’s among the many questions that were posed to Trudy Lieberman, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and press critic for the Columbia Journalism Review. Lieberman recently completed a cross-Canada public speaking tour, as a Fulbright Scholar and guest of the Evidence