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 …
How do we get more doctors to practice in rural communities? This has been a long standing challenge in Canada — getting physicians to work where we need them — especially in provinces with large rural populations. Policy makers have created and implemented some promising solutions, but until recently, there has been little evidence on …
For most parents today, stress is a constant companion. Everyone’s heard of the dangers of high blood pressure, of chronic workaholics having heart attacks at forty, of harried professionals pouring themselves an extra glass of wine (or three) with dinner. Pausing at our desks or kitchen tables for an all-too-brief moment, many of us long …
Hip and knee replacement surgeries are among the most cost effective medical interventions developed, with the vast majority of patients enjoying a greatly improved quality of life as a result. They are also among the most popular surgeries. You might be surprised to learn that Canada’s yearly 75,000 joint replacements, at an estimated $15 000 …
The tsunami metaphor is more and more often used in commentaries about the effect of aging on health care spending in Canada. It musters up images of devastation and irresistible strength submersing any levees the system might try to mount to oppose it. It is a powerful but misleading metaphor. There is a worrying rise …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The last time I was in Israel, I went on some home visits with a palliative care physician in the town of Sfat near the Sea of Galilee. My colleague, a devout Jewish doctor, took me to several homes to offer advice on managing his most serious, terminally ill patients. One older Chassidic Rabbi was …
When the human genome was mapped in the 90s, everybody from scientists to Silicon Valley CEOs believed it would revolutionize medicine by making it personalized. This carried enormous medical and financial opportunities, as well as ethical and legal challenges. But after decades of research, it has become evident that our genome is not nearly as …
As the United States attempts to overhaul health care and improve access for more of its citizens a US Senate committee recently met in Washington and invited several international experts to share perspectives on their own health care systems. Toronto physician Dr. Danielle Martin very nicely represented the Canadian perspective. It was an articulate presentation …
When I was a medical student in the mid-2000s, I witnessed the early phases of mobile apps designed to help deliver healthcare. They were mostly electronic books, in the form of preloaded web pages. We’ve come a long way: I’m now a practicing physician and I find myself using an increasing number of mobile health …
Vaccines do not cause autism. Yet when one peer-reviewed paper suggested otherwise, on the basis of results that were both wrong and fraudulent, there were terrible consequences. It launched 15 years of unnecessary studies to confirm what we already knew – and sowed confusion, eliminated rational debate about the merits and risks of vaccination, and …
Across Canada, health system leaders are recognizing the need to provide more effective and more efficient care to the highest users of the health care system. In December 2012, the Ontario government launched an ambitious Health Links strategy to better address the needs of the top 5% of health system users, who consume two thirds …
The Canadian health care system is inefficient. It will come to no one’s surprise. Most Canadians agree that we need to improve the efficiency of the health system and get better value from the dollars invested in health care. In fact, all countries struggle with this challenge. We were interested in getting a better understanding …
For the other side of the debate, read Monika Dutt’s Medical tourism is bad business for Canadian hospitals In recent weeks a few people have written about international patients in Canadian hospitals, “medical tourism” and the “slippery slope” that the writers all seem to believe will inevitably lead to two-tiered medicine. We are responsible for the …