Tag: deals

In medicine, before a doctor treats a patient’s illness, they first try to get a sense of the person’s health.

They collect information on the symptoms, run tests and blood work and gather whatever details they can.

That way, they’ll know whether or not the medicine has worked.

It’s called establishing a baseline, and policy experts do the same thing to figure out if their latest strategy has actually fixed the problem.

When it comes to fixing Canada’s ailing health-care systems, governments have often failed to set that baseline – so it’s difficult to know how well the treatment has worked, said Haizhen Mou, a professor with University of Saskatchewan Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.

She launched a research project to study whether past health accords between federal and provincial governments have made meaningful differences in the quality and availability of health care in Canada, but ran into trouble almost immediately.

“What I’m trying to figure out is whether we can find comparable data to conduct a meaningful evaluation of the impact of those health accords,” Mou said.

“So far, the answer is no.”

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Premiers agree to accept Ottawa’s health funding offer: ‘A step in the right direction’

Successive federal governments have attempted to measure the impact of the cash they inject into provincial and territorial health systems over the years by demanding reports on specific indicators. Every new deal has led to incremental improvements in health-data collection over the years, said Mou.

This time, the government is looking to create a complete picture of the system by overhauling the way Canada collects and shares health data.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered provinces and territories $46 billion in new spending over the next 10 years to address the health crisis that unfolded in the