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  • Child & Family Policy Context

    CMHA Ontario welcomes implementation of Police Records Check Reform Act

    posted November 9, 2018 / No Comments

    … police are not permitted to disclose non-conviction mental health records, including those that stem from apprehensions under the Mental Health Act… non-conviction mental health records will no longer appear on police record checks… People have been turned down for volunteer work, jobs, school placements and cross-border travel because authorities shared non-conviction records and personal mental health information showed up on police record checks.

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Fixing solitary isn’t enough. Canada’s prisons need to be reformed top to bottom

    posted November 7, 2018 / No Comments

    … progress on the issue of reducing solitary confinement is halting at best, in spite of heightened public attention… the broader question of getting Canada’s prison system back on its intended course – that is, rehabilitating convicted criminals and preparing them for their eventual and in most cases inevitable release – has not been addressed. The overuse of solitary confinement is, in fact, a symptom of a larger problem.

  • Health Policy Context

    Ontario should stop stalling on making payments to doctors public

    posted November 6, 2018 / No Comments

    … it is so alarming that months after taking office the Ford government has yet to enact regulations that would bring into force the Health Sector Transparency Act passed by the previous Liberal government. It should quit stalling. The legislation would compel drug companies and those that manufacture medical devices to publicly report cash payments, free dinners, trips and other benefits they dole out to doctors, dentists and pharmacists.

  • Health Debates

    Bureaucracy should not stand in the way of a dignified death

    posted November 6, 2018 / No Comments

    … under Canada’s MAiD rules, to be eligible a patient must have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” their death must be “reasonably foreseeable,” they must be capable of informed consent, they must have the approval of two independent physicians (or nurse-practitioners), make the request in writing in the presence of two witnesses, have an unofficial cooling-off period to be sure their decision is final and then give “late-stage consent” just prior to the injection of the drug cocktail that will hasten death.

  • Health Delivery System

    Hatred of Big Pharma won’t get us better drug prices

    posted October 23, 2018 / No Comments

    Talking about the price of drugs is very 20th century; in the 21st century, and the impending era of personalized medicine, what matters is the value treatments provide. For drugs such as Remicade, we should be paying, and paying fairly, when the drug works, when it delivers on a specific treatment goal.

  • Inclusion History

    The health system in Canada’s North is failing — but not by accident. ‘It is designed to do what it is doing’

    posted October 20, 2018 / No Comments

    During the 1920s, the government began to build segregated Indian hospitals. Many community and city hospitals refused to treat Indigenous patients or relegated them to separate wards, basements and poorly ventilated areas. Missionaries had established Indian tuberculosis sanitoriums, which were then taken over by the government and later converted to general hospitals for Indigenous people.

  • Health Debates

    Why the good doctor is burning out

    posted October 20, 2018 / No Comments

    When in conflict, in almost every instance, the interests of the young today will be sacrificed for those of the old. Power will be accrued and not released, while debt will be accrued but not paid… Maybe young physicians despair for exactly the same reason that young people generally report unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression: the people who are supposed to be nurturing them.

  • Child & Family Policy Context

    Liberals unveil bill to end solitary confinement in federal prisons

    posted October 17, 2018 / No Comments

    Bill C-83 would eliminate two forms of solitary confinement currently used in federal prisons – administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation – and replace them with specialized living units that would provide high-risk inmates at least four hours a day outside their cells and two hours a day of human interaction… judges in both B.C. and Ontario struck down pieces of the law governing solitary confinement in federal prisons.

  • Health Delivery System

    How One Researcher Is Blocking the Road from Hospital to Homelessness

    posted October 15, 2018 / 1 Comment

    in her work as a researcher, Forchuk conducted a review of discharge processes in several Ontario hospitals and found that, as a result of changes in policy, discharges into homelessness were becoming more common… Her current project attempts to intervene in such cases, providing resources to those leaving medical wards so that they can continue healing…[It] has already helped keep dozens of people out of homelessness.

  • Health Debates

    The truth behind wait times and private health care

    posted October 5, 2018 / No Comments

    We have emergent issues to address in our health care system, but most come from its two-tiered part, not its universal part. Thirty per cent of our system is private… Our health outcomes are impaired by the lack of non-physician public health care: lack of dental care that drives people to the ED for tooth pain, lack of physiotherapy that results in a reliance on opiates for back pain rather than desperately needed manual therapy, and a lack of pharmacare that ends in 1-in-10 Canadians being unable to fill their prescriptions.

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