Primary care is the foundation of Ontario’s health care system and more than 137,000 patient care visits are made every day to primary care providers – family physicians, general practitioners and nurse practitioners – in the province. However the quality of care that patients receive in primary care is largely unknown. Even primary care providers …
When Canadians travel abroad for private medical care they are engaging in what is known as medical tourism. Medical tourism is a global, multi-billion dollar industry. Patients from all regions of the world are traveling to a growing list of countries as medical tourists. Our research group studies medical tourism, with a particular focus on …
The Personal Health Navigator is available to all Canadian patients. Questions about your doctor, hospital or how to navigate the health care system can be sent to AskLisa@Sunnybrook.ca The Question: My mother is in hospital. We feel she is not well enough to go home as she cannot get up to go to the bathroom or …
Sometimes I smugly think that I know a reasonable amount about health care in Canada and elsewhere. Well, it is always good to have one’s smug illusions shattered every once in a while. When in Europe recently, I was at a presentation by the Turkish government about their focus on “medical tourism” – attracting residents …
Vigorous patient advocacy over the past 25 years has pushed funding for breast cancer research in Canada to the top of the charts, outstripping the amounts devoted to research into other cancers. It’s a remarkable success story for a type of cancer that, just forty years ago, was spoken of only in hushed tones. But …
When I joined the Ambulatory Practice of the Future (APF) as a first-year resident, I learned that the primary care clinic had an open notes policy: whatever we wrote about our patients could be seen by our patients through a secure online portal. It was a startling departure from medicine’s tradition of records shrouded in …
Anne Harrison lives in Huron County with her husband. For nearly two and half years, her husband was medicated for anxiety and stress he was experiencing at work. The medication didn’t help. They didn’t know what was wrong, and worried he might have a brain tumor. In June of 2011, her local family health team, …
If you came here from another country and opened a newspaper, you might well come to the conclusion that Ontario’s health care system is falling apart. It seems that every day there is a headline about a scandal in one part of the health care system or another. An Auditor General’s report is released criticizing …
Over the last year, reports have suggested some of Ontario’s new primary care models, which are significantly more expensive than older practice models, have had limited success in improving access and quality. In response, the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care is conducting a review of these models, and had recently instituted a temporary …
This past spring, I was sitting in a reception area at the Scottish Ministry of Health. On the wall next to me was a poster on which the indicators by which the Ministry was going to be judged were clearly outlined. I was so surprised that I literally got up from my chair to get …
The rotating internship was abolished in the early 1990s, mainly at the prompting of the College of Family Physicians of Canada to address shortages in Family Medicine. Prior to this, newly graduated medical students completed a one-year internship to obtain a general license to practice medicine and were then free to pursue further specialty training …
An Ottawa area pilot project that facilitates electronic consultations between family physicians and specialists has proved so popular among doctors and administrators that its architects are finding ways to make it permanent. These consultations occur before an actual referral to a specialist is considered by the family doctor. “Doing referrals as a family doctor is one …
The goal of the public health system in Canada is to improve the health of communities, whether that is locally, provincially, nationally, and/or globally. Historically, most significant improvements in health occurred in the realm of public health, including preventing infectious diseases and improving water quality. These areas are still vital – we don’t typically worry …
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is a proposed free trade agreement currently being negotiated between Canada and the European Union. The negotiations have mostly been taking place away from the public eye, but since the leak of CETA intellectual property (IP) chapter, it has slowly garnered attention due to the provisions relating to …
A growing number of Canadian doctors are underemployed after finishing their training. There are a number of likely causes, including a lack of infrastructure funding, delayed retirements, and a lack of health human resource planning at the national level. After about two decades of strongly worded public headlines and numerous government reports about doctor shortages, …
Last week, the family that owns Shouldice Hospital announced that it would like to sell its facility to Centric Health, a for-profit company traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Shouldice, a facility renowned for its care of patients with hernias, was founded by a surgeon in the 1940s and allowed to continue as a private …
Public health officials must find better ways to communicate with parents about the risks and benefits of childhood vaccination, researchers and public health officials agree. That task is particularly challenging in the absence of a national, or a provincial, vaccine surveillance registry because, to target messages effectively, accurate and timely information about vaccination rates and …
An interesting story came across my desk recently. Apparently, some states in the U.S. have moved towards a punitive model in trying deal with medical errors and adverse outcomes – this particular story describes how Utah will no longer fund healthcare providers and hospitals for dealing with illnesses that resulted from avoidable errors and infections. On …
The re-emergence of vaccine-preventable illnesses is a major concern for Ontario’s public health officials. Efforts to create a national vaccine registry have stalled. A real time, comprehensive vaccine registry and surveillance system in Ontario may be the best answer to the information deficit. Faced with a measles outbreak at an elementary school, nurse Susan Otten spent …
Recently, I had the experience of sitting with a family member who had undergone surgery in a large academic health sciences centre. The staff and the care were excellent. However, I couldn’t help but notice the nearly relentless quest of staff searching for supplies and equipment. Supply carts were everywhere – lined up in hallways, …