Archive for the ‘Health Delivery System’ Category
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Paying doctors and wait times: How does Canada compare?
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
May 02 2012
A recent paper put out by the OECD suggests that in 2004 Canadian GPs were paid about the same in PPP dollars as doctors in Switzerland and Austria, but less than those in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. Using the comparison to average wages, however, Canadian GPs are among the highest paid in the OECD, just below the United States (3.2 times the average wage versus 3.4 in the U.S.)… Simply spending more doesn’t seem to solve the wait time problem, but targeted spending on agreed upon targets that increases productivity appears to deliver better results than across-the-board increases to any part of the health-care system.
Tags: budget, globalization, Health, ideology, standard of living
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How do we control physician costs?
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Mar. 20, 2012
In its last deal, the OMA did well, squeezing 12.5 per cent in pay increases out of the government over four years – 3, 2, 2 and 4.5 per cent annually from 2008 to 2012… Very few doctors get a set salary that can be frozen… About 70 per cent of Ontario doctors now receive some level of alternative funding but, over all, 70 per cent of their earnings come from fee-for-service billings. In the recent report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, Don Drummond said this equation should be flipped so that doctors receive 30 per cent of their pay via fee-for-service. Otherwise, it’s virtually impossible to control costs.
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | 1 Comment »
Ontario hospital-funding changes to favour growing communities
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Mar. 18, 2012
The Ontario government is doing away with the global hospital budgets that for decades have allocated funding evenly across the board… Health Based Allocation Model, or HBAM for short, will divert more money to hospitals in regions where the population is growing and aging and where health-care costs are often higher. Hospitals will also be in line for additional money, based on how effectively they treat patients… The pay packets of hospital executives are now linked to their progress in meeting quality-of-care targets…
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | 2 Comments »
Canadian health care needs a massive transformation
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar 14 2012
We need to provide comprehensive, integrated, community-based services that will improve population health, reduce inequities, reduce health-care expenditures and contribute to the sustainability of our publicly funded health system.
One essential step toward this transformation would be a coordinated pan-Canadian effort to develop indicators and databases that will support accountability in health care and drive the required changes… The health-care system was designed long ago to attend to a high prevalence of acute, infectious disease rather than our current pattern where chronic conditions prevail. The old business model provides poor service for people today with chronic conditions
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health, standard of living
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Ottawa’s health-care dollars should come with strings attached
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 07, 2012
Stephen Harper, it is said, has a compartmentalized view of federalism. Let Ottawa do what Ottawa should do; let the provinces do what they should do. Let each stay out of the other’s hair… Conservative or Liberal, every federal government since Diefenbaker has placed some conditions (or tried to) on federal transfers for health care. Federal governments wanted political profile, of course, for Ottawa’s money, but they also sensed that the public viewed health care as something “Canadian” that transcended provincial boundaries.
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health
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Time to clarify health-care hierarchy
Friday, February 24th, 2012
February 23, 2012
… would it be fair to hold a health-care worker to account for a patient’s social economic status, low income, poor education, unemployment, or housing insecurity?… It’s important to clarify who is primarily responsible for obtaining health outcomes. If a health-care worker is most important, there should be no concern with altering payment to be based on performance instead of delivery. However, if a health-care worker is only marginally associated with improving health status, continuing fee for service would obviously be preferred by most practitioners.
Tags: budget, disabilities, Health, mental Health, poverty, standard of living
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Drummond Report: Hospital amalgamations and more power for LHINs among recommendations
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Feb 15 2012
The prescription to fix Ontario’s health system may sound harsh — amalgamating hospitals, reducing the powers of doctors in policy decisions and empowering local health integration networks — but it may be necessary for patients, says the commission in charge of reforming public services… “The health-care system is not really a system,” the commission writes. “What we have is a series of disjointed services in many silos.”
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health
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Help coming for those on home-care waiting list
Saturday, February 11th, 2012
Feb 10 2012
Facing continued criticisms about 10,000 people on waiting lists for home care, Health Minister Deb Matthews says changes are coming to get help to more people…. Money from home care filters down from the health ministry to local health integration networks and then community-care access centres that handle requests for care from the public before funding gets to agencies with nurses, personal support workers and other staff providing services to patients… administrative and case management costs totalled 30 per cent of the home-care budget…
Tags: budget, disabilities, Health, standard of living
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Why not try after-hours care the Dutch way?
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Feb. 02, 2012
… the Netherlands and France, have created 24/7 physician coverage. Health care is often provided in people’s homes or at a nearby clinic, not at the nearest hospital… You’d think such a system would be prohibitively expensive. Yet, when it comes to chronic illness management, Canada spends far more than either the Netherlands or France.
Tags: budget, Health, standard of living
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Premiers don’t need slush fund to innovate in health care
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Jan. 17, 2012
Financial necessity is the best spur to innovation, not a slush fund labelled Innovation. But the premiers, even those who had seemed to welcome a unilateral federal funding plan, can’t seem to focus on the next steps to building a more innovative, agile, cost-effective health-care system. Not to mention one of higher quality… An Innovation Fund is not the mother of invention. Necessity is.
Tags: budget, Health, rights, standard of living, tax
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