Here’s what you need to know about the Canadian Dental Care Plan, which launched on May 1
More than one million Canadian seniors who don’t have dental coverage can now receive free or subsidized care under the new federal Canadian Dental Care Plan, which launched May 1.
The initial rollout covers Canadians aged 65-and-older, with the goal to eventually provide dental care for uninsured Canadians with an annual household income under $90,000.
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Recently, popular American comedian and talk show host Bill Maher took aim at some of Canada’s public policy failings in one of his monologues. In entertaining fashion, Maher highlighted our high housing costs, unemployment rates and “vaunted” health-care system.
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February’s announcement that the Trudeau government had made a deal with the NDP to push the ball forward on pharmacare doesn’t appear to have resonated in the polls. That’s not surprising. Canadians are saying loud and clear that pharmacare isn’t even their top priority for health care.
That’s evident from new research conducted by Leger on behalf of my organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, SecondStreet.org, and the Montreal Economic Institute.
Leger asked 2,017 adult Canadians to pick the top three health-care problems that most “need fixing.” National pharmacare came in second last of nine options. Just 14 percent had pharmacare in their top three while nearly two-thirds (65 percent) chose the lack of family doctors, more than half (52 percent) chose ER wait times, and nearly half (44 percent) selected wait times for surgeries and other common treatments.
Canadians may support pharmacare in principle, but it’s hardly among their most pressing health-care concerns like faster access to doctors, emergency rooms, and surgeons.
And yet, there may be a way to do it all. Canada may be able to deliver not only the must-haves like universal primary care but also the nice-to-haves like drug coverage for those currently falling through the cracks. It would just take some courage from politicians.
There is an obvious way to find the money: it would simply require amending the Canada Health Act to make explicit that provinces would no longer be penalized if they allowed a small number of willing patients to buy quicker care so that provinces can loosen their rules.
This would then free up scarce resources such that provinces could expand public drug coverage beyond their current programs. One might think of it as a policy swap whereby public coverage would be somewhat curtailed for hospital and physician services and somewhat expanded
Welcome to Ask A Dietitian, a series where Yahoo Canada digs into food trends and popular nutrition questions with registered dietitian Abbey Sharp.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Contact a qualified medical professional before engaging in any physical activity, or making any changes to your diet, medication or lifestyle.
In a world dominated by social media images of fitness models and celebrities, the concept of a “goal body” has become pervasive. But is the obsession with achieving a specific physique healthy?
Registered dietitian Abbey Sharp recently responded to an online troll who questioned why they should listen to her if she doesn’t have a “goal body.” The social media user then commented again on one of Sharp’s TikTok videos, claiming a goal body is one “20 pounds lighter” than Sharp’s.
The dietitian responded saying: “If I was 20 pounds lighter… I would be officially very underweight… Which tells me I would need to be physically sick and malnourished for people on the internet like that, to respect my evidence-based content.” Sharp then added, “My body is not my business card… And for the record… I f——— love the body that I have.”
As a dietitian, Sharp says body positivity and weight loss can co-exist, as long as your “body goals” are coming from a place of self-care. She told Yahoo Canada how to set a ‘goal body’ and how to approach weight loss in a healthy, sustainable way.
When asked about the notion of a “goal body,” Sharp noted, the term is “often used on the internet to describe a specific
Supporting well-known brands and hidden local gems
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Canada is home, and from coast to coast we love to support our neighbours – spelled with a “U” and all.
When it comes to Canadian companies, we’ve got some great small mom-and-pop shops and some international behemoths, like Canada Goose. We also recently discovered some great finds from companies we didn’t even know were Canadian.
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All this to say, it’s nice to support local however you can. Here are some of our favourite Canadian fashion and lifestyle brands.
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Canadians are working while ill to avoid losing income. Instituting country-wide sick-leave policies is a healthier option.
(Photo illustration by Maclean’s, background photo via iStock)
For the past 16 years, I’ve worked as a family doctor in community clinics throughout the country—in Yellowknife, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, Toronto, and in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where I’m based right now. In all of these clinics, I’ve encountered patients facing the same crippling dilemma: work while ill or lose income because their employer doesn’t provide them with paid sick days. As a doctor, my typical advice is for them to stay home and take all the time they need to recover. Many aren’t able to, and some end up back in my office a week later with a more severe version of their initial illness. I don’t blame them: we live in a country where paid sick leave is seen as a privilege, rather than a universal right.
One of my current patients is a single mom of two young kids who works two part-time jobs in health care, neither of which offer her paid sick leave. Because she has difficulty covering basic expenses, she will sometimes go to work when sick—even though she works with vulnerable patients, many of whom are at risk for severe illnesses if she infects them. She confided that, sometimes, she also sends her sick kids to school if child care isn’t an option.
After many years of witnessing scenarios like hers, in 2018, I joined the Decent Work and Health Network, or DWHN, an advocacy group of health-care workers focused on creating equitable conditions for all workers, including migrant workers. Factoring in the recovery times for common minor illnesses, worker experiences and evidence from other countries, DWHN is pushing for a minimum of 10 employer-provided, provincially mandated
A Canadian class-action lawsuit accusing a popular fertility tracking app of sending users’ intimate health information — including details about their periods, sex lives and pregnancies — to companies like Facebook without their knowledge has been allowed to go ahead.
The claim, certified in B.C. Supreme Court on Thursday, said Flo Health collected their highly sensitive personal information, promised to keep that information private and then knowingly shared the data with third parties.
“There’s been a significant disclosure of the private information of Canadian women, and we’re excited to be proceeding to the next step with the case,” said Richard Parsons, who is co-counsel on the case.
The ruling is a pivotal step forward for the case. It will test lagging Canadian privacy laws in a time when millions of people regularly pour their personal information into their phones. If the claim succeeds, more than one million people who used Flo in Canada over a three-year period will be eligible to claim damages.
None of the lawsuit’s claims have been proven in court. In a statement to CBC News on Friday, Flo said it “has never sold user information or shared user information with third parties for the purposes of advertising.”
“Flo will vigorously defend against allegations stipulated in the case.”
Flo is an app that tracks users’ fertility and periods. Users enter personal information about their height, weight, sex lives and reproductive cycles — including details about their periods, vaginal discharge, pregnancies, miscarriages, births and postpartum symptoms.
Jamie Kah Cate Lam, the lead plaintiff in the class action, said she used the Flo app for 18 months while she and her husband were trying to conceive. The B.C. woman gave the app information about the different stages of her menstrual
As Canadian health systems add new technologies such as electronic medical records (EMR), care coordination platforms, wearables, remote patient monitors, and -internet-of-things devices, cyberattacks pose new privacy and financial risks for patients, providers, and institutions, according to a new analysis.
Canadian physicians, whether in large hospitals or individual clinics, can improve their ability to prevent and respond to a cybersecurity attack through a four-stage plan, the authors wrote.
Vinyas Harish
“We have worked hard to write this piece in a way that clinicians, whether they work at a large academic institution with dedicated cybersecurity expertise or by themselves in a rural, private practice, can take away tangible and practical measures to improve their cybersecurity posture,” author Vinyas Harish, an MD/PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, told Medscape Medical News.
The analysis was published online November 20 in CMAJ.
Since 2015, Canadian health information systems have faced at least 14 major cyberattacks, including nine with ransomware or malware threats and six data breaches that compromised personal health information. These types of attacks are increasing, and even if no ransom is paid, cyberattacks can lead to health system downtime, patient safety concerns, and technology vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity practices vary widely across public sector institutions within the provinces and territories, and smaller private organizations often lack financial and human resources to train employees and mitigate risks. Although some shared services models are being tested, such as an Ontario Health pilot with six regional security operation centers, clinicians and health systems must be aware and create their own cybersecurity plans that are appropriate for their devices and information systems.
Harish and colleagues suggested focusing on the following four stages of cybersecurity: prevention, detection, response, and recovery. During the initial stage
Canada’s health-care system needs to adopt better security practices as cyberattacks, including data breaches and ransomware, become increasingly common in the country, experts say.
Since 2015, at least 14 major cyberattacks have targeted Canadian health information systems, according to an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Monday.
Most recently, five Ontario hospitals, along with their shared IT provider, were affected by a ransomware attack last month that caused an outage of some online services, forcing many surgeries and appointments to be postponed.
The province was hit by another massive cybersecurity breach in May, with the personal health information of 3.4 million people who sought pregnancy care and advice in Ontario compromised.
Canada ranks 10th in breach count globally, with more than 207.4 million compromised accounts since 2004, according to Surfshark’s annual index on digital well-being.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security warned in an August report that over the next two years, Canada’s critical infrastructure will “almost certainly” continue to be targeted by cybercriminals.
While the digitization of health information systems on shared networks has helped with convenience, access and quality of care, the technology has also presented security risks, co-authors from the University of Toronto, Unity Health Toronto and the University of British Columbia said in the CMAJ article.
“Although some clinicians have dedicated information technology (IT) training, most do not, and navigating increasingly complex health information systems can create considerable stress,” they said in the paper.
Health organizations are “financially lucrative” targets and often have a history of relying on outdated systems, which make them vulnerable to cyberattacks, the researchers noted.
In an effort to clamp down on cyberattacks, the federal government tabled legislation last year that would give Ottawa sweeping new
Cyberattacks can incur privacy breaches and financial harm, as well as directly threaten patient safety and health system functioning.
Reducing the risk of cyberattacks and managing those that do occur happens in 4 stages: prevention, detection, response and recovery.
As novel areas of cyberthreats emerge (e.g., Internet-connected devices), clinicians and health organizations should be vigilant for recalls, keep software up to date and discuss possible risks with patients.
Keeping workflows efficient and maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture has trade-offs; however, the minor inconveniences of security measures such as 2-factor authentication are far preferable to recovering from an attack.
Canadian health systems have digitized considerably. In 2019, 86% of surveyed Canadian family physicians reported using electronic medical records (EMRs).1 Digital tools for virtual care and remote patient monitoring, wearables, care coordination platforms, and Internet-of-things (IoT) devices are all permeating practice.2 The digitization and integration of disparate health information systems on shared networks promises greater convenience, access and quality of care, but also introduces risk for patients, providers and health systems. Although some clinicians have dedicated information technology (IT) training, most do not, and navigating increasingly complex health information systems can create considerable stress.
Cyberattacks can incur privacy breaches and financial harm, as well as compromise patient safety and health system functioning. Personal health information (PHI) can fetch much higher prices on the dark Web than other personal information (e.g., credit card details).3 In a 2021 international survey of health IT decision-makers, the average cost of a ransomware attack was US$1.27 million. 4 Cyberattacks against health information systems have been associated with delays in care, diversion of patients to other sites and increased mortality.5 Cyberattacks against Canadian health information systems are increasingly common, with 48% of all reported 2019 Canadian breaches occurring in the health sector.
