When provincial and territorial Health Ministers meet Wednesday with the new federal Health Minister Dr. Jane Philpott, it is imperative they focus not simply on the amount of money coming from Ottawa but rather on what matters most: how to get value and performance from our health care dollar. The late Jim Flaherty set the table …
Patients and their families were treated with “callous indifference.” Water was left out of reach. Soiled bed sheets weren’t changed, sometimes, for months. The abuses that took place between 2005 and 2008 in an England hospital shocked the country. A 139-day public inquiry revealed that there were many signs leading up to the abuse. If acted …
In 2007, a group of Canadian cardiologists found themselves in a unique position. New – and expensive – implantable cardiac defibrillators were being used by fewer than a dozen doctors. And the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences was offering to help them create a registry that would track outcomes for five years. Soon, they had the largest registry …
As both users and funders of health care, Canadians have a stake in understanding how well their system is performing. Polls repeatedly show health to be a top priority for Canadians and their appetite is strong for performance information, provided it is easy to access and digest. The challenge is in developing reports that are …
Dear Healthy Debate community, Working on Healthy Debate for the last few years has been enormously rewarding for our whole team. We’ve been delighted with the response from our community, and even a little surprised by how much our readership has grown. Healthy Debate has gone through a lot of positive change lately. We’ve completely …
Progress has been made in measuring the quality of Canadian health care. Yet there are still large gaps in what is measured in our health care system, and much of what is measured is only useful to top-level system managers, not to the front-line clinicians whose day-to-day work is so important to the overall quality of the system. This leads experts to question whether measurement is being used effectively to improve the quality of Canadian health care.
Following the public release of Rate My Hospital report last week, I received the following question on twitter: “CBC 5thEstate is being pretty provocative, are hospital CEO’s cringing across the country? Reaction?” Personally, I welcome the public scrutiny, and support actions that increase the transparency and accountability of our health care system. Ontario has been publicly reporting on …
Last week, the governing council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) voted unanimously in favor of changing its bylaws to allow for public reporting of the results of inspections of Out-of-Hospital Premises, such as private colonoscopy and plastic surgery clinics. This change was made following reporting by the Toronto Star, which …
Jane’s story Jane is a 60 year old woman living in Waterloo, Ontario (a number of details of Jane’s case have been changed to protect her confidentiality). For several years she has been experiencing worsening back pain, which was recently diagnosed as spinal osteoarthritis (a degenerative condition that can cause severe back pain). The pain has grown …
Although there is lots of talk about making measures of health system performance available to the public, the reality often falls short of the aspirations. Not only are these measures often difficult for public users to understand and access; evidence suggests that they have little impact. In April of this year, the Canadian Institutes of Health …
A recent Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) Report obscurely titled Health Indicators 2012 revisits the topic of the impact of prevention on reduced mortality which was first profiled in the 1974 Lalonde Report – A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians. This caused me to go back and reread the 38 year old …
The statistics are well known: 7-10% of hospitalizations include at least one “adverse event”, a broad definition including a variety of mishaps ranging in impact from the relatively benign to a lethal outcome. Health care systems have been late adopters of proactive policies in the area of patient safety. This delay can be partly attributed …
A recent report describes how Canada’s healthcare system performs compared to 13 other countries. Canada ranked at the bottom in access to care and use of electronic health records, and in the middle regarding costs and health outcomes. Thirty-eight percent of Canadians felt the system works well, 51% thought it needs fundamental change, and 10% believed …
Hospital accreditation is a process that assesses a hospital’s performance against a set of standards. This process is done differently across provinces and countries. In Canada, most hospitals go through an accreditation process conducted by Accreditation Canada. The accreditation process could be more transparent and provide more information to the public about the quality of …
Ontario’s hospitals are required to publicly report how often staff wash their hands. There is large variation in hand washing rates between hospitals. This variation more likely reflects how hospitals measure hand washing, rather than the frequency of hand washing itself. Ontario’s hospitals are required to publicly release information about how often staff wash their …