Canadas | BFG

May 18, 2024admin

Using evidence to inform health decisions — Canada’s Task Force on…

Canadians are bombarded by many sources of evidence for health information. The number of studies, with variable quality, and trustworthiness, make it difficult to know what is important, from deciding how to quit smoking, the pros and cons of medications to decisions on screening for diseases like cancer.

It’s also not easy for family doctors, nurse practitioners and other primary care clinicians to sift through this evidence for what is most applicable to their patients.

National guidelines

National clinical practice guidelines bring much-needed clarity to the deluge of scientific information. These recommendations, created by internationally respected groups like the Task Force, summarize the best available evidence to help primary care providers and patients make important decisions on diverse topics such as screening for various cancers, thyroid dysfunction, and chronic health conditions, as well as interventions aimed at prevention like tobacco use and falls.

“The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care was formed decades ago to provide unbiased and trustworthy guidance for primary care providers around key issues related to screening and disease prevention,” said Dr. Guylène Thériault, a family physician, teacher of evidence-based medicine and Task Force Chair. “We tackle complex evidence about screening for colorectal, cervical and breast cancer and other topics. Through systematic methodology, Task Force members, content experts and evidence synthesis groups lead comprehensive reviews, then summarize this information with patient input to deliver evidence-based guidelines for primary care providers and for Canadians”.

The Task Force is led by a national, independent panel of health professionals whose core members are primary care providers. It includes family physicians, nurse practitioners, specialists and prevention experts, as well as people with expertise in evaluating evidence.

Breast cancer screening guideline update 2024

Breast cancer is a disease that touches many Canadians. That’s why the Task Force is committed to developing

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Health Care

April 23, 2024admin

In Canada’s mental health care crisis, prioritize access to medication

Opinion: First phase of proposed national pharmacare legislation doesn’t include medicines for mental illness. Will Canadians living with mental illness continue to be marginalized in future phases?

Published Apr 17, 2024 • Last updated 5 days ago • 3 minute read

Minister of Health Mark Holland speaks about new national pharmacare legislation during a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. Photo by PATRICK DOYLE /THE CANADIAN PRESS

In Canada, a country celebrated for its fair and universal health care system, a significant disparity exists today around the accessibility of medicines for mental illness. This inequity not only underscores a critical gap in our health care model, but it also highlights the need for an improved mental health approach in all Pan-Canadian initiatives, including future national universal pharmacare.

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Department Health

March 28, 2024admin

Bilodeau: Traditional thinking isn’t going to fix Canada’s health care

The Canada Health Act was a good solution for its time, but hanging on to it with a kind of religious fervour will just make things worse. No policy is good forever.

Published Mar 25, 2024 • 3 minute read

The Emergency Department entrance at The Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus in Ottawa. There are ways to take the pressure off ERs. Photo by Justin Tang /The Canadian Press

If there were easy solutions to the current crisis in our health-care system, they would likely have been found by now. Playing every few years with the structure, like most provinces do — centralizing-decentralizing-recentralizing — has produced no observable improvement.

Our system has been deteriorating for a number of years, and repairing what has been broken will also take a long time. So I am not proposing a solution but rather a series of ideas that may, over a decade or so, lead to significant improvement.

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Health Care

February 22, 2024admin

OP-ED: Adam Smith’s “saline solution” for Canada’s health care system

Canada’s health care system is on life support, but many of its patients are languishing on wait lists, getting slowly sicker and in many cases simply dying untreated. Sick patients are frequently subjected to poor care – if they get care at all – while frontline health care workers are subjected to overwork.

The average waiting time from referral to treatment was 27.7 weeks in 2023. In some parts of Canada, such as Nova Scotia, where the average wait time was 56.7 weeks or over one full year, it takes significantly less time to create a human than to treat one.

Not to mention the other 631,527 Canadians who were waiting for surgery last year. As the World Population Review notes, Canada has the world’s tenth-largest economy, yet we come eighth-to-last among “developed” nations in hospital bed availability, with only 2.5 per 1,000 inhabitants.

As shown in a poll by Angus Reid, three in five Canadians consider our health care system poor, with one-third agreeing that increased privatization would improve health care delivery.

And that brings us to Adam Smith, the famed 18^th century Scottish economist and moral philosopher. By shaking Smith’s “invisible hand,” the Canadian health care system could finally tap into the power of market forces to drive efficiency.

The antediluvians who still believe health care and competition are incompatible should consider boarding the Smith ship, and fast, because Canada’s current health care system is about to go under. To call our health care universal is to satirize it.

Smith’s 1776 magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, has undoubtedly passed the test of time. But can it still last long enough to get a kidney transplant in the Canadian health care system? Let us find

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Health Information

February 6, 2024admin

How better and cheaper software could save millions of dollars while improving Canada’s health-care system

Billions of Canadian tax dollars have been funnelled to private companies to develop proprietary medical software. More tax dollars were then paid to the same companies to use the software to run our medical system.

This might not have seemed like a big deal at a time when Canadians could easily get a doctor and our medical system had one of the best doctor-patient ratios in the world.

Fast forward to today, when one-fifth of Canadians cannot find a doctor and more than half “battle” for appointments. You can now easily spend an entire day waiting when you visit the emergency room. Wait time for surgeries and diagnostic tests such as MRIs are much longer now, and over 17,000 Canadians died waiting for health care in 2023.

The once-great Canadian health-care system is being pushed to its limits, and as a result, is “failing.” Add Canada’s recent population growth into the equation, and you have an under-resourced system that is stretched too thin.

The health system might be better prepared for these challenges if literally billions of dollars had not been squandered on proprietary software development. A new study I wrote with my colleague Jack Peplinski at Western University shows how embracing open-source development saves millions and could help rescue Canada’s broken health-care system.

Undoing waste

A woman in a white coat and stethoscope with an iPad — On top of the cost of development, with proprietary software, each doctor’s office as well as each hospital has to pay for its own electronic health record licence.
(Shutterstock)

Although the Canadian federal government has invested over $2.1 billion developing health information technology (HIT), all 10 provinces still have their own separate HIT systems. Besides being an obvious source of redundancy and waste, these systems:

do not work together,
are expensive and
are inconsistent.

After first

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Health Care

January 24, 2024admin

Opinion: To fix Canada’s crumbling health care system, we need better tools than duct tape

There’s a new symbol for what ails Canada’s collapsing health care system: The duct-tape ribbon.

Dr. David Keegan, a professor of family medicine at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, came up with the idea after seeing media reports of staff at hospitals in Red Deer and Calgary using tarps and duct tape to create makeshift consultation spaces in their bursting-at-the-seams facilities.

The duct-tape ribbon symbolizes how the health system is barely being held together, literally and figuratively.

But the more important message in the ribbon is: Fix it.

The constant MacGyvering, like creating new spaces with duct tape and tarp, will get us through in a pinch, but it’s not sufficient, nor sustainable. Nor is the expectation that health professionals should toil to the point of burnout. A healthy system requires healthy employees, not martyrs who set themselves on fire to keep others warm.

We need more permanent solutions, whether it be to staffing shortages or infrastructure deficiencies. We need a solid foundation, not a crumbling shell held together by duct tape.

Wearing a ribbon won’t magically improve the state of health care. But it sends an important, twofold message: Let’s talk frankly about the state of care, and let’s commit to improve it.

Coloured awareness ribbons – pink for breast cancer, red for AIDS, and so on – have a fascinating history.

The concept dates back to the U.S. Civil War, when women tied a yellow ribbon in their hair, or on a tree, to symbolize the hope that a soldier-husband would return home safe. The tradition was revived in 1979, when the wife of a hostage who had been taken in Iran signalled her desire to see her husband home again with a yellow ribbon, a gesture copied by millions.

In 1990, at the height

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Department Health

December 23, 2023admin

Abdulla: A doctor’s Christmas wish for Canada’s health-care system

What we currently have is a ‘sick-care’ system, when what we need is a proper focus on preventive, ethical and proactive care.

Published Dec 16, 2023 • Last updated 6 days ago • 2 minute read

The Emergency Department entrance at the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus: Patients are simply not being well-served by the ‘health care’ system that should prevent them having to go to the ER. Photo by Justin Tang /THE CANADIAN PRESS

I have been a comprehensive “cradle to grave” family doctor since 1993. After 30 years of looking after great grandparents, grandparents, parents, children and new babies, I have never been so conflicted.

I love my patients, their stories and their joys, and feel truly blessed to have been a healing part of their wretched sorrows. I love being a family doctor who mixes science, medicine, stories, art and sometimes persuasion to help guide my patients to their best health outcomes. It has been a “life’s calling” that has helped me during my own divorce, estrangement from my two youngest children, my depression, my rebirth, my new marriage, my new children, and my new life of gratitude and service.

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Health Care

December 21, 2023admin

Canada’s health care system overwhelmed with steep rise in respiratory viruses

A person draws out Moderna vaccine during a drive through COVID-19 vaccine clinic at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., on Jan. 2, 2022.Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press

A steep rise in respiratory viruses across the country, combined with low vaccine uptake and busy holiday get-togethers, are raising alarm among medical leaders and experts who say the spread of preventable illness is going to add more strain to an already overwhelmed health care system.

“There’s just a myriad of viruses that are under way right now,” said Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association. “There’s no question at all that our emergency departments and our hospitals are full to the gunwales.”

Influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, are all on the upswing across Canada. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, said the spread of seasonal viruses is “already posing significant challenges to hospitals.”

This week, the World Health Organization declared the rapidly spreading JN.1 subvariant as a “variant of interest” separate from its BA.2.86 parent lineage.

The JN.1 variant appears to be more easily transmissible than other circulating Omicron strains, given how fast it is growing. According to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, JN.1 accounted for 0.2 per cent of all COVID-19 cases detected in the country as of mid-October. Forecasted estimates suggest that by Dec. 10, JN.1 would account for nearly 30 per cent of cases.

While there is no evidence that JN.1 causes more severe illness in those infected, the rapid spread will add pressure to hospitals, said Anne Gatignol, professor in the departments of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at McGill University.

“When more people are infected, the consequence is more people will go to the hospitals, even if the proportion of

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Health Care

December 13, 2023admin

Fraser Institute News Release: Canada’s health-care wait times hit 27.7 weeks in 2023–longest ever recorded

This section is

by GlobeNewswire

Published Dec 07, 2023 • 3 minute read

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 07, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Canadian patients waited longer than ever this year for medical treatment, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

The study, an annual survey of physicians across Canada, reports a median wait time of 27.7 weeks—the longest ever recorded, longer than the wait of 27.4 weeks reported in 2022—and 198 per cent higher than the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited in 1993, when the Fraser Institute began tracking wait times.

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Health Care

December 8, 2023admin

Canada’s ‘haves-and-have-nots’ health system lags behind Europe, study finds | Canada

Funding cuts, fewer generalists and inefficient organisation are preventing more and more Canadians from accessing public primary healthcare, according to a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) which compares Canadian healthcare unfavourably with public systems in nine Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

About 20% of Canadians have no family doctor at all, and many more have irregular access to clinicians – a reality likely to worsen if not properly addressed now, said Dr Tara Kiran, a family physician in Toronto and one of the authors of the study.

“In Canada, what we have is a haves-and-have-nots situation,” said Kiran. “[There are] people who do have access to a family doctor and sometimes even a health team, and then those who have nothing.”

The CMAJ study, led by family physicians and researchers at the University of Toronto and published on Monday, compares the Canadian healthcare system with those of Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and the UK. Those countries were chosen because 95% or more citizens have access to a family physician.

Among the study’s chief conclusions is that countries that design healthcare systems around the principle of guaranteed access have far different – and usually better – outcomes than those in Canada.

Important comparative differences included higher rates of primary care funding, more doctors, better organisation and information systems support and greater physician accountability to the public insurer.

But perhaps the biggest difference, said Kiran, is that “they set a goal that primary care is something that should be guaranteed to everyone in the population, and they design around that”.

She pointed out that Norwegians and Finns are automatically registered to a doctor or health centre, and those in the UK have a right to register with

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Tag: Canadas

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Undoing waste

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