Have you thought about submitting a blog post to a website like Healthy Debate or KevinMD, but aren’t sure where to start? Have you written a few blogs and want to know how you can improve? We love receiving blog submissions (you can submit one here!) and we often get asked what makes for an …
The United States began releasing the Medicare payments it made to individual doctors on April 9, a move that sparked sensational headlines and debates about privacy. The data offer insights into the $77 billion paid by Medicare’s fee-for-service program to more than 880,000 health care professionals in 2012. Should Canadian provinces follow the U.S.’s lead and publicly …
Nearly two years ago, the federal government made significant cuts to its Interim Federal Health Program, which allows refugees to access essential health services, such as medical testing and treatment. As a result, many refugees have lost access to health care, medication coverage, vision and dental care. Furthermore, persecuted individuals from designated countries of origin, such as Hungary …
Expenditures on public health care in Canada appear to be slowing raising the possibility that the health care cost curve is finally being bent and the system transformed. Numbers from the Canadian Institute for Health Information show that real per capita public sector health spending peaked in 2010 at $2,687 (1997 constant dollars) and is …
Family medicine was a popular choice among medical graduates in the 1980s, when Roger Strasser was training at The University of Western Ontario. “The residents had almost a missionary zeal that they were going to be family doctors,” he says. He shared their passion, becoming a family physician. But when he returned to Canada in 2002, after going back …
With the summer months ahead– many of us plan to explore the outdoors, perhaps spend a weekend by a lake or camp in a provincial park. For the vast majority of Ontarians, time spent in the outdoors doesn’t mean that we are far from the safety net and comforts of home. If we run into …
In the year since Healthy Debate published Fewer hospital staff on weekends put some patients at risk, evidence of a “weekend effect” at hospitals has continued to mount. Today, the Canadian Institute of Health Information released a new report which further reinforces that for some patients admitted to hospital on the weekend, there is a …
Many Canadian children struggle with their weight. The number of kids with childhood obesity has been growing since the 1970s, with measured rates rising from 6% in 1978 to 13% in 2004. In addition, 18% of children are overweight. It’s part of a larger global trend: 23% of children in developed countries were overweight or obese in 2013. In …
June 16th, 2014 will mark the 3rd National Day of Action to Stop Cuts to Refugee Health Care in Canada. Concerned members of the Canadian public and healthcare providers across the country will again join forces to protest the changes that were made to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) in 2012. The IFHP was …
I recently attended a briefing of Ontario health system stakeholders by representatives of the famed Kaiser Permanente Health System, often called America’s leading nonprofit integrated health plan. Kaiser Permanente representatives are regularly invited to Ontario to provide advice (and maybe hope) to the rest of us that health system reforms could produce the same sort …
There’s a common catch phrase used by those championing efforts to prevent childhood obesity: “This may be the first generation of kids to not outlive their parents.” Sounds terrifying – except that so far, there is little evidence to support this idea. Over the past several decades we have seen a remarkable increase in adult …