Friday, October 3, 2014: A CBC headline read, “Could Ebola vaccine delay be due to an intellectual property spat?” By the next morning a colleague, Richard Gold of McGill, and I had figured out that the “IP” (intellectual property) was in fact a non-story. Whatever was delaying the start of a research trial to test …
Ontario’s decision to move more hospital-based services to the community is a sensible and laudable policy that has to be backed up with appropriate safety and quality regulation, as well as reimbursement practices. In the last couple of years, in the face of clear, published evidence of quality problems in at least some private clinics …
The highest profile direct-to-consumer genetic testing company in the world, 23andMe, has opened shop in Canada. In addition to providing information about your genetic ancestry (turns out I am 100% Irish), 23andMe will, after your genetic information is pulled from the required tube of spit, provide you with a whole bunch of genetic risk information …
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. …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …