A dispute between some researchers and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR – Canada’s largest health research granting agency) about how many large clinical trials should be funded by the CIHR has recently gone public. The scientists believe that more large clinical trials should be funded in Canada, and they should decide which ones. …
In 2007, a group of Canadian cardiologists found themselves in a unique position. New – and expensive – implantable cardiac defibrillators were being used by fewer than a dozen doctors. And the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences was offering to help them create a registry that would track outcomes for five years. Soon, they had the largest registry …
Clinical knowledge has now become easier to obtain than ever. Open-access medical journals that waive subscription fees for readers, electronic medical record systems such as My e-Health in British Columbia that allow patients access to their own lab results, and full subscription to point-of-care tools such as UpToDate by patients have flattened the information hierarchy …
If you regularly peruse the pages of Healthy Debate, you’re in the bubble; one could call you an ‘insider’. If you’ve heard of the Canadian Institute of Health Information or Health Quality Ontario, or if you scan the news for columns by André Picard, Kelly Grant or Tom Blackwell, then you are an insider. Do you ever tune into White Coat Black Art, …
Can health care learn from assembly lines? Manitoba’s St. Boniface General Hospital thinks so. It’s been using Lean, a system inspired by Toyota, on processes around the institution. Last year, one of its projects was to reduce wait times for CT scans. Staff ran a Rapid Improvement Event, where a team mapped out patient flow and …
Society is in denial about death, especially in the context of medical care. People visit their doctors for cures. Few expect to be told there is no fix, let alone that their illness will lead to their deaths. Medical education reflects that same social discourse. Though I frequently provide care to dying patients, my medical education was …
A recent article in Healthy Debate highlighted the possibility of uncovering incidental findings as a significant challenge in genomic sequencing. An incidental finding is a genetic condition that causes a disease unrelated to the reason genetic testing was initially ordered. For example, imagine you have been recently diagnosed with a serious disease, such as colon …
If you’re looking for evidence-based health information in Canada, a lot depends on who – and where – you are. A physician in a teaching hospital? No problem. But family doctors in rural areas, nurses or physiotherapists have a much harder time accessing up to date materials. And the general public is more likely to find …
When federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced proposed changes to nutrition labels this summer, dietitians and the public were excited. With the current labels, shoppers looking for healthier products needed to be either a biology expert or a math whiz to succeed. But will the new ones solve the problem? Here are five of the proposed …
Shalimar Novak is sick of paying for parking. The social worker has been to Toronto’s Mount Sinai once or twice a week recently for appointments related to her pregnancy, and paid about $15 every time. “It definitely adds up,” she says. “And when you have a kid coming, you’re thinking in diaper dollars. It would be nice …
Through our work looking at the negative public health impacts of coal on Albertans’ health, we often run into skeptics. “Show me the grave of someone who died from coal!” they demand. This is difficult, given the nature of coal’s effect on our health: the science of public health looks at things at a population, …
Canada spends a significant proportion of its budget on health care, while achieving average population health outcomes compared with other OECD countries. It is difficult to achieve coordinated and comprehensive care, due in part to the strain of a dependence on acute care services, accounting for nearly 30% of total health care costs. An aging …
As a primary care physician, I support using data for quality improvement and research. But when I recently helped a family medicine resident complete a research project, flaws in our current system became evident. Her chart review was focused on women in prenatal care who had no health insurance at my workplace, the Somerset West Community Health …
How many nursing home beds are needed in Canada to care for frail, elderly people with high care needs? That’s a question that policy makers across the country are grappling with, given the aging population and especially the rapidly growing number of very elderly people over the age of 85. Many people as they age …