Archive for the ‘Health Policy Context’ Category

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Ottawa’s new health funding is tied to better data. What will that really mean?

Monday, February 13th, 2023

… as with all data, the devil is in the details.  What exactly are health outcomes? Are they the same as health indicators? How will they be measured, and how can we ensure they are reported meaningfully and transparently for all Canadians? And most importantly: Will new health data meaningfully improve health care for Canadians?

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Steps to a First Class Canadian Health Information System

Saturday, February 11th, 2023

1st… all parties benefit from better data… 2nd… identify the current data shortcomings… a collaborative task between levels of government… 3rd, the federal government should agree to pay for the incremental costs of the new system… 4th… with StatsCan, CIHI, and others, senior levels of government should establish protocols for the analysis and distribution of the improved health information… [and] 5th, some issues will need Canada-wide policy development

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How Ottawa can help fix health care: first, send less money

Friday, January 27th, 2023

When one level of government is raising the money, while another spends it, it makes it hard for the public to know who to hold to account for any of the system’s ills. That, too, dulls any lingering incentive for reform…  without Ottawa to share the blame for underperformance, provincial governments would have a stronger incentive to organize the delivery of health care so as to achieve greater quality and public satisfaction per dollar spent.”

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Trusting the Ford government to get health reform right? That’s a big ask

Thursday, January 19th, 2023

… if you want doctors working overnight on-call shifts when you have a medical emergency, you want doctors to be associated with hospitals… public hospitals aren’t for-profit but they have budgets, and they make money on the easy procedures so that they can afford to handle the hard, necessary, more laborious ones… farming out easy surgeries without expanding public capacity needs to be considered carefully.

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Ontario does not need more for-profit surgery

Wednesday, January 18th, 2023

Repealing Bill 124, for example, would be a first step in attracting nurses back to hospital ORs, and moving surgeries to dedicated community facilities could increase volumes by 30 per cent for roughly the same cost. But investing more broadly in for-profit surgery providers – which has enormous risks for hospital staffing, and will increase the costs passed on to patients and taxpayers – should not be on the table.

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Why for-profit homes won’t solve long-termcare issues: Privatizing health services is a bad idea that just won’t go away

Wednesday, January 4th, 2023

… for-profit services do nothing to address the major crisis in labour force supply, do nothing about public costs and do too little about public access to care. In fact, they do the reverse; they drain the public system of both people and money. Adding more for-profit services fragments a system already suffering from fragmentation… And the public sector is in a position to quickly offer better work for health-care workers who are at the centre of our health-care system, and more equitable access for all. 

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10 ways to fix Canada’s health care system right now

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

Canada’s health care system requires major reform and possibly radical solutions. Here are 10 solutions to these problems that might be achieved without having to resort to increased privatization… In this 10-part series, we will present 10 major problems that commonly arise within the Canadian medicare system.

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Here is a health care to-do list for the federal government

Saturday, December 17th, 2022

The major question in the federal/provincial/territorial debate on health care funding should not be on whether there should be conditions but on what these conditions should be… with funding withheld or returned when these conditions are not met… Addressing health care means… moving on to how can we build a public health-care system that works across the country and for our populations in all their diversity.

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Federal healthcare funding should have strings attached

Saturday, December 17th, 2022

Simply dumping health care dollars in provincial capitals is not a solution. Tossing money at Doug Ford, who has chosen license rebates and gas tax cuts (extended for another year) over more health spending is a particularly bad idea. It would offer a bandage when triage is required. Without a strategy and targets, there would be no assurance the extra federal funds would be going to healthcare…

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Provinces want a blank cheque for health care. Ottawa should say no

Wednesday, December 14th, 2022

In the short term, the supposed health care transfer would simply go to pay down the debts of subnational governments… With recent history as a guide, much of that money would go to increasing salaries of health care workers, not to improving services… In that light, Ottawa’s position that ties new funding to a national health data system makes sense. So does its push for goals in key areas of reform, including family health and long-term care.

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