I’ve been reading a new book called Oppression: A Social Determinant of Health, edited by Elizabeth McGibbon. The book raises the question of why we continue to have such vast health inequities in Canada, despite the volume of evidence pointing to the large role played by the social determinants of health in causing illness and …
My friend Ron is an energetic seventy-year-old who is diabetic. We live in northwestern Ontario, in a town called Kenora, two hundred kilometers east of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Ron’s life has just been complicated by the fact that his family doctor moved away recently. Why is this a particular complication for him? Because the lab in …
“A 41 year-old woman with no documented medical history or family history of disease presents to you complaining of occasional chest pains on exertion. How many would order a stress test to rule-out cardiovascular disease?” asks Dr. Gary Bloch, to a captivated audience of resident physicians currently in training at an academic learning day – …
March 8th, 2012 marked the 101st annual celebration of International Women’s Day. Originally conceived in Europe in 1911 to draw attention to the struggle for women’s equal participation in society, IWD has become both a day of celebration and an opportunity to highlight the progress still needed to achieve women’s equality. Certainly, great gains have …
Health Apps will be “prescribed” by clinicians for their patients in the near future. This article tries to sketch out how this “TechRx” and “Apps Pharmacy” process could/should develop. According to a recent report from Healthcare Information Management Systems Society, there are about 17,000 healthcare apps currently in use. This compares to a reported 300,000 …
Almost a decade ago, in my mid thirties, a routine physical showed elevated liver enzymes. Follow-up tests three months later showed them rising. My doctor was diligent, and referred me to the liver clinic at Toronto Western Hospital. What followed was a year-long series of interventions, which at first were benign – lose ten pounds …
An E Health scandal? The real E Health scandal is that we don’t have an electronic health system. In an age of Google and 4G smart phones– the health system still functions largely with paper and fax. What we need is a fully integrated complex data system that not only has patient information in it …
This year I did not achieve Elite status on Air Canada/Aeroplan. For the first time in a decade, I am without status on a major airline. No number to call, no priority service, no lounge. I will probably have to wait in line. As you probably know, Aeroplan has Prestige, Elite, and Super Elite levels …
Tomorrow, final year medical students across the country (including myself) will login to the CaRMs website and learn our fates for the next 2-5 years. The ways in which residency positions are assigned were well discussed by healthydebate. The factors that contribute to medical student choice of discipline and location are widely varied and include …
I’m not an expert on health care in Ontario – I still live in Alberta – but from afar the health chapter of the Drummond Report looks good. I think they got the diagnosis right! The health care system isn’t a system, there are inefficiencies, and the system needs to be reoriented. The prescription is …
“What’s the harm in taking something small? It’s just a pen. It’s only lunch. It was just one weekend at the bed & breakfast with my partner. And I learned about a topic that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Plus I got some samples in return! It won’t affect my prescribing habits…” These are …
I became sold on the value of primary care in a way that I wouldn’t have had I not gone through this experience with my sick child… My mindset for years: My pediatrician minimizes my concerns The few times that I had raised concerns with my childrens’ pediatrician, I had been advised that it is …
Canada contributed 3.6 billion dollars in assistance to developing countries in 2005-2006. But we and other rich countries practice what has been called by some “foreign aid in reverse”: The recruitment of foreign health professionals from the developing world, a potential obstacle to the deployment of our initiatives in poorer countries. The WHO estimates that …
Someone or something needs to control health care, set an agenda, perform long range strategic planning, monitor performance, make corrections, bring in new ideas, and eliminate old ones. That is a tall order in the context of a health care system that is perhaps our most complicated decision making environment; one that has such an …
Recently Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews made a speech to the Toronto Board of Trade in which she introduced changes to the province’s health care system. Hmmm – interesting choice of audiences. The Ontario government is preparing for an upcoming provincial budget. It is widely expected to contain drastic spending cuts as recommended by economist …
More and more doctors across Canada are using electronic medical records to keep track of their patients’ health information. Finding a patient’s information record in most electronic medical databases involves entering the first few letters of each name, hitting <Enter> and choosing the appropriate person from the resulting drop-down list. Recently while looking up one …
Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long Term Care, Deb Matthews, has called them “a bit of a secret in health care”. The Honorable Roy Romanow is a big supporter of them. They are Tommy Douglas’ “Second Stage of Medicare” in action. Are Community Health Centres (CHCs) the best kept secret in health care and, if …
In my last post I explored how stress, debt, and environmental destruction seem like obvious implications of consumption. But what if too-much-stuff is also the source of physical illness? John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas Naylor brilliantly address this issue in their book Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic in their depiction of consumerism as a …
Design does matter. It matters as much as where something is made – just think about the simple phrase that comes with most Apple products: “Designed in California, Assembled in China.” Recently, 10 nursing regulatory bodies gave away a significant right to the design and quality assurance of Canadian nurses to an American nursing organization. …
The expected negotiations between the federal and provincial governments on the renewal of the 2004-2014 accord were only starting to attract some attention… until the Harper government’s strategic masterpiece: The unilateral announcement of a multi-year funding framework, combined with a clear message on the respect of provincial/territorial jurisdiction. The pure “per capita” funding model could …