It isn’t visions of sugar plums that are dancing in the heads of health professionals this holiday season. Accessible health care for all is the gift they hope to find under their tree, with maybe a lump of coal set aside for our politicians.
Looking back on this past year, for better or worse, there have been a lot of changes in the Canadian health-care landscape.
Viral pathogens of all sorts have had their moment. Avian flu spread widely among wildlife and livestock in North America this year, with the first human case in Canada appearing in B.C. in November.
Canada saw a significant rise in measles cases compared with last year, prompting discussions of a national vaccine registry.
The impacts of long COVID continued to reverberate through our communities. One Statistics Canada survey found that seven per cent of Canadians were living with the debilitating condition, yet 40 per cent of those affected still have difficulty accessing care.
For reasons that remain unclear, the toxic drug supply crisis became marginally less fatal in 2024, though an average of 21 people in the country are still dying each day from drug poisoning.
And while staffing crises continue to plague hospitals, family doctors are seeing fewer patients, and health-care wait-times have reached an all-time high, there are silver linings if you squint.
As emergency doctor Raghu Venugopal highlights, it’s not all bad news in Ontario’s emergency departments (EDs). This last year, many significant investments were made to speed up access to hospitals, expand RSV vaccination programs and even convert a parking lot at Toronto’s Unity Health Network into a supportive housing facility.
An innovative family care program in Kingston, Ont., could serve as a model to climb out of the primary care crisis.
The implementation of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence are helping to ease health-care administrative burdens, particularly in crucial areas like family medicine.
The 2023 federal health-care funding to provinces and territories in the form of bilateral deals is still underway, targetting four key areas over the next 10 years. While some target areas like mental health still lag behind, others are showing signs of improvement. The number of surgeries completed in Canada has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 2.3 million surgeries performed last year – a 5 per cent increase compared with 2019.
As we look toward the new year, we asked our experts what they considered to be the most crucial areas of focus for our system: If they could gift our health-care system with a little holiday magic, what would they wish for?
