Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

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Taking Back Health Care: How to Accelerate People-Centred Reform Now

Wednesday, January 25th, 2023

A set of public policies aimed at not just treating illness, but also promoting health and providing the infrastructure to support health resilience, will lead to a more affordable system in the long run and ultimately a greater public good… health is fundamental to the economic and social resiliency of our country and the well-being of its population. These expectations provide the road map for modernizing our health system.

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Our health-care leaders wilfully ignored the benefits of virtual walk-in medical care

Sunday, January 22nd, 2023

Conflating an association between virtual walk-in clinic visits and added ER visits with causation perpetuates the thinking of our health-care leaders’ that virtual walk-in clinics are subpar… How will our leaders explain all this to the 1.8 million Ontarians without a doctor, and to the millions more who cannot access their doctor in a timely fashion, who have had virtual care — their health care lifeline — mercilessly taken away from them?

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Doug Ford’s private surgery plan is driven by ideology not innovation 

Sunday, January 22nd, 2023

… the government will expect the private facilities to take it upon themselves to prevent the luring of medical professionals from the public system. The foxes will be charged with guarding the henhouse… When the auditor general can find widespread abuse in the current limited private surgery sector, we can only shudder at what she’s likely to see after the government implements its plan to vastly expand private, for-profit surgeries.

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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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Our health-care system is broken. More of the same won’t fix it

Monday, January 16th, 2023

In fact, Canadian medicare is more costly than ever, and more expensive than in other countries with universal health care, yet less responsive to patient needs. What’s the remedy? … medicare has long relied on private operators who take payment from the government – not the patient – to deliver those services… voters will tire of the ideological rigidity that conflates medicare’s commendable values with a system that doesn’t always deliver measurable value for money.

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We can’t view health as an exclusively personal matter – it’s a collective endeavour

Monday, January 9th, 2023

… health care, including hospital capacity, testing and biomedical treatments, or individual behaviours… are critically important. But what gets overlooked… is… the political economy of health… In a wealthy country, everyone should have the material and social foundations needed to have a good life and participate with dignity in society… “We have more than enough money and capacity to make that happen, but we haven’t.”

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Health-care reform needs the discipline of deadlines

Thursday, January 5th, 2023

Health-care needs more money. But money without the certainty of reform merely sets up the next cycle of failure. Political pressure might force each participant into agreeing to hard targets for improvement by set dates, before money is allowed to be on the agenda… The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) exists, in part, for just such a task. A rolling 12-month evaluation on progress toward agreed targets could become a permanent feature of Canadian health care.

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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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In vilifying safe supply, Pierre Poilievre has picked the wrong target

Wednesday, January 4th, 2023

Pierre Poilievre… states that the opioid crisis is the result of “a deliberate policy by woke Liberal and NDP governments to provide taxpayer-funded drugs – to flood our streets with easy access to these poisons.”… the Canadian Police Association and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police have both supported the use of replacement drugs. Using a safe supply to save lives is key to what we should all be doing – taking care of some of our most vulnerable citizens. 

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