Health « Social Policy in Ontario

Posts Tagged ‘Health’

Five things to know about health-care talks Tuesday between Trudeau, premiers

Monday, February 6th, 2023

… some sort of federal health transfer dates from 1957, when Ottawa offered 50-50 funding for health care to provinces that agreed to provide public hospital services based on national standards. It has evolved and changed at least five times since then, including splitting the federal share between cash and a transfer of tax points — when the federal government cut its income tax rates and the provinces could raise their own in exchange.

Tags: budget, Health, jurisdiction, mental Health, Seniors, standard of living
Posted in Health History | No Comments »

Health811: Get connected to health care 24/7

Wednesday, February 1st, 2023

Health811 is a free, secure and confidential service that Ontarians can call or access online 24 hours a day, seven days a week to receive health advice from qualified health professionals, such as registered nurses, locate local health services and find trusted health information… Health811 is for non-urgent health questions and concerns only and is not a substitution for 911, which should still be used for a medical emergency. This service is also not a replacement for regular touchpoints with health care providers.

Tags: Health, mental Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »

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.”

Tags: budget, Health, jurisdiction, mental Health, tax
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »

Premier Doug Ford should explain why he underfunds public health care

Thursday, January 26th, 2023

If Ontario just spent the average of what the other provinces have spent on health care per capita over the past five years, we’d be spending an additional $7.2 billion this year — more than enough to properly pay our beleaguered nurses, lure thousands more nurses to Ontario and bring back into use countless hospital operating rooms all over the province idled by years of budget cuts.

Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, participation
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »

Real health innovation means investing where health begins

Wednesday, January 25th, 2023

According to health science, federal Liberal investments in child care, housing, poverty reduction, and climate action ARE investments in health. Federal leadership has been necessary because provinces have been retreating from investing in the social conditions that shape health and well-being. Any additional federal transfers for health ought to encourage provinces to achieve a better balance in their social and medical spending in order to promote health.

Tags: economy, Health, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »

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.

Tags: economy, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, mental Health, participation, standard of living
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »

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?

Tags: Health, ideology, jurisdiction
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »

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.

Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, privatization
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »

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.

Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, privatization
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »

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.