496 Results for mental health

Why are kids waiting so long for mental health services?

Underfunding and fragmentation of children’s mental health services mean families can wait 18 months and longer before finding help for their children.

Many hospitals don’t do enough to support health workers after an adverse event

The boy stopped breathing. That morning, he had been admitted with what seemed like a seizure to the emergency room at IWK Health Centre in Halifax. He had been given drugs to stop the seizure. Katrina Hurley, an emergency doctor just starting her night shift and taking over the case, thought the boy was over-sedated

Mental illness shouldn't mean a shortened life

Serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have a profound impact on the lives of the people affected by them. About 1% of the Canadian population has schizophrenia and 1% suffers from bipolar disorder, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. People with major mental illnesses also have higher rates of other acute

Achieving better health for the homeless

Walking through the streets of any large city, one sees many homeless people. Nearly two in three have a history of some form of mental illness. Hospitals have become the place where homeless people with serious mental illness go during a crisis, but hospitals are poorly equipped to meet their needs. How can society improve

Family Care Clinics - filling a gap or costly duplication?

During her campaign for reelection in 2012, Alberta premier Alison Redford promised to create 140 Family Care Clinics (FCCs) over three years. She articulated a vision of primary care that would be one-stop, with many different health care providers under one roof. These clinics would have expanded hours to improve patient access, and would focus

Are Health Links targeting the right patients?

One of the priorities of the Ontario government is to develop strategies to reduce the disproportionate amount of health system use, and in particular of acute hospital care, by small sub-groups of people, such as seniors, those with complex chronic health issues or people whose health is complicated by mental health or substance use issues.

Heads up: there are lessons for Canada in U.S. health care reform

If you could design a health care system from the bottom up, odds are that you would create one that would focus on the comprehensive health care needs of all citizens, from disease prevention to chronic disease management to palliative care. Innovation would be rewarded. There would be fewer hospital and long-term care beds and

Beyond tokenism: How hospitals are getting more out of patient engagement

When Frank Gavin’s son was a child, he frequently had to be rushed to the emergency department at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. One of the first things that struck him was, despite all the young children and parents in the department, finding the washroom was like navigating a maze. Gavin’s experience as a parent

Can financial incentives help patients be healthier?

When Egon Jonsson was thinking about how best to support alcohol-addicted pregnant women, he thought of a controversial solution: paying them not to drink. The idea was inspired by studies that have offered shopping vouchers to pregnant women who succeed in giving up cigarettes. But when Jonsson and his team at the Institute of Health

Are we training too many doctors, or too few? Why no one really knows

Across Canada, governments, medical schools and health providing organizations continue to struggle with one of the most difficult questions in health care: How many doctors in each area of medicine do we train today to meet tomorrow’s health care needs? In Ontario, concern of an oversupply of doctors in some specialties led the government to

“Tough on crime” agenda ignores mental illness issues in Canada’s criminal justice system

Canada’s prisons have become the “asylums of the 21st century”. Yet despite evidence from the Mental Health Commission of Canada that the current criminal system is failing to address mental illness in our prisons, the Government of Canada continues to push a “tough on crime” agenda. According to a report from the federal prison ombudsman,

Mental health: moving beyond just medication

We deserve universal access to psychotherapy as part of Canada’s mental-health coverage. Here’s how to make it happen.

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