Archive for the ‘Health Delivery System’ Category

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Ontario government tables legislation to make PSW wage increase permanent

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

If passed, the Pandemic and Emergency Preparedness Act, 2022 would see workers in long-term care and community care continue to receive a raise of $3 per hour while workers in public hospitals will keep their $2 per hour bump… The government had been extending the measure for months at a time throughout the pandemic. Also included in the legislation is a commitment to recruiting and retaining more doctors, nurses and PSWs by way of a $142 million investment through the “Learn and Stay” grant.

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Doug Ford’s government is quietly privatizing health care

Wednesday, March 16th, 2022

Recently, Health Minister Christine Elliott announced the expansion of private hospitals in Ontario… “we can let independent health facilities operate private hospitals.”… [which] sounds a whole lot better than this: “We will award public funds to private, for-profit hospitals and clinics, knowing that these private facilities are associated with worse care, higher costs and more deaths.”

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Ford government to add more than 450 new seats to Ontario medical schools

Wednesday, March 16th, 2022

The new seats will be broken down into 160 undergraduate seats and 295 postgraduate seats… this marks the largest expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate education in over a decade… in part, as a solution to a significant backlog of medical procedures in Ontario created by the pandemic… [which] has created a backlog of more than 21 million patient services, such as MRIs and cancer screenings, that may take years to clear.

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Health-care unions call Ontario’s one-time $5K offer to nurses ‘demoralizing’

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

The healthcare unions, which represent a combined 220,000 workers across Ontario, said in their letter that the shortage “requires urgent action to better respect, protect, and pay all healthcare workers.” They say that should begin with repealing Bill 124. That legislation was introduced in 2019, and capped annual salary increases for many public sector employees, including nurses, at an average of one per cent annually for three years. 

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Why Canada hasn’t been getting the new antibiotics we need to fight drug-resistant ‘superbugs’

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

… due to the cost of developing these drugs and their susceptibility to eventual resistance, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned antibiotic development… newer antibiotics are used only as a last resort, reducing the volume of sales and return on investment for companies that are still willing to bear the costs of development… [and] manufacturers still producing antibiotics tend to shy away from the Canadian market due to Canada’s small population, financial barriers in our publicly funded system and burdensome regulatory processes.

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Digital Health Tools Must Remain a Core Part of Canada’s Post-pandemic Health Care Delivery System

Wednesday, January 19th, 2022

Doctors couldn’t access patient records, some systems were only available in facilities that were themselves not physically accessible, large data systems didn’t work, telemedicine networks didn’t scale. The health-care system itself hadn’t adequately planned for a pandemic! This broken system must end now… We can start with three: labs, drugs, and patient record summaries. 

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How the COVID-19 pandemic has affected abortion care in Canada

Thursday, January 6th, 2022

Pandemic-related travel restrictions and facility closures initially jeopardized access to abortion care. However, the pandemic has also become a catalyst for more accessible ways to deliver abortion care, such as providing medical abortions, which are drug-induced rather than surgical, via telemedicine… Research shows that telemedicine abortion care is safe, and enabled people to seek care despite pandemic-related restrictions and personal concerns.

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Thousands of Canadians died because COVID-19 delayed surgeries, doctors say

Tuesday, November 30th, 2021

Statistics Canada… estimated 19,501 excess deaths in Canada, or 5.3 per cent more deaths than would be expected if there were no pandemic after accounting for changes in the population, such as aging… The report looked at backlogs for eight procedures: breast cancer surgeries, coronary artery bypass graft, CT scans, MRI scans, colectomies, knee replacements, cataract surgery and hip replacements, and found backlogs due to COVID delays ranged from 46 to 118 days.

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We can re-define Canada’s health systems because we already have

Sunday, August 1st, 2021

We know we can build better health care because we did. When the pandemic forced us to pivot, our health systems learned quickly. This must continue… The best solutions are often the simplest, rooted in both evidence and common sense. We have seen care models that are trauma and culturally informed, offered by people who have roots in the community. We have seen a smarter use of existing resources, including a leveraging of virtual care. 

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‘Not vaccine hesitancy but inequity.’ Organizers take us inside Toronto’s northwest pop-ups where lines form everyday at 5 a.m.

Tuesday, May 4th, 2021

… thousands lined up in rain and snow make it clear that low vaccination rates in these communities aren’t products of vaccine hesitancy. Rather, the situation unfolding has everything to do with structural inequities that starve communities of key resources, and in this case, life saving vaccines in the midst of a deadly pandemic… If vaccines are made accessible in trusted spaces, through trusted relationships, people will come.

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