Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

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Answers from COVID experts…

Monday, December 20th, 2021

… trust is really the major factor… the social media discourse has a huge role to play in the way that trust has eroded as a society… there are reasonable concerns about the government imposing mandatory measures, but there are choices to be made about the collective health of the population.

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It’s time for this generation’s political leaders to tackle the hard issues in Canadian health care

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

Provincial health-care systems differ widely over titles, practices, pay and performance metrics. Their contribution to wider sharing of best practices could be agreeing to some shared definitions, targets and an agency to measure performance… as the pandemic revealed, provinces in a health-care crisis must support each other.

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Better health data means a healthier Canada

Friday, December 10th, 2021

Health care data collection and analysis can be complicated in Canada — we have 13 different health systems… Here’s what we need now: More comprehensive data… More timely data… More sharing… Give researchers access to health data so they can inform problem solving on important files like health equity; and work with First Nations, Inuit and Métis health organizations to ensure they have access to the data they need to meet their priorities.

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Canadians need accessible mental-health services, not a fight over who can claim responsibility for those programs

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021

For provinces that agree on almost nothing else, this remarkable unity when it comes to avoiding common standards in all future care programs erodes a sense of a nation. A feeling of inclusion comes from knowing that despite political differences among the provinces, people can count on specific standards of care wherever they are in the country.

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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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Our nursing crisis is a public crisis

Wednesday, October 13th, 2021

It is not a mystery why nurses are leaving. They are overworked, face brutal working conditions, and a decade of wage suppression has been locked in even further by Bill H-124… The Ontario government’s solution to the nursing shortage is to train more nurses rather than stemming the tide of experienced nurses leaving… Just like physicians, there are areas of specialization within nursing that involve years of extra training… We call on the Ontario government to invest in nursing, stop calling nurses heroes and start treating them like human beings.

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The PM must insist on conditions for health care funding to provinces

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

Instead of rushing to hold negotiations this fall, as the premiers asked, Trudeau should put forward proposals of his own, starting with his long-promised pharmacare program, potentially bundled with any Canada Health Transfer increases. A single-payer public drug plan is supported by 86 per cent of Canadians according to the Angus Reid Institute, is backed by the NDP, and would save billions of dollars for employers, families, and especially the provinces.

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Once COVID is finally tamed, Canada will have to tackle the ‘other pandemic’

Monday, September 13th, 2021

Neither major party is prepared to go where an increasing number of medical and legal experts — from public health officers to those chiefs of police — say they should: taking possession of drugs for personal use out of the Criminal Code entirely. And neither party is particularly eager to talk about the opioid crisis during the election campaign… It should be getting more attention from both politicians and voters.

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Canada needs a social contract for mental health

Wednesday, August 25th, 2021

… the Canada Emergency Response Benefit was arguably the most important mental-health innovation of the pandemic because it decreased financial uncertainty, demonstrating how important government can be in improving mental health. The Canadian Medical Association has calculated that 85 per cent of our risk of illness is linked to social factors such as housing, unemployment, poverty, systemic racism, and lack of access to social supports and health services. These are the types of stresses that are interacting with COVID-19 to drive our mental-health and substance-use crisis. 

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We broke down the hospitalization risk of going unvaccinated in Ontario. Here’s what the numbers say

Wednesday, August 18th, 2021

Unvaccinated Ontarians are ending up in hospital with COVID-19 nearly 20 times as often as fully vaccinated individuals and in the last week have been about 70 times more likely to end up in intensive care… there are more than six times as many unvaccinated patients currently hospitalized with COVID (68) as fully vaccinated individuals (11)… an unvaccinated Ontarian has been nearly nine times more likely to test positive for COVID than a fully vaccinated individual; they’ve been 19 times more likely to end up in hospital; and at the most serious end, the unvaccinated have gone to the ICU more than 70 times as often as the larger population with both doses.

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