Op-Eds
Published in the Financial Post.
The crisis in Canada’s primary care is reaching a breaking point. A staggering 6.5 million Canadians are without a family doctor or nurse-practitioner (NP). A recent C.D. Howe report by one of us (Zhang) calculates we would need at least 7,844 more family physicians to meet current demand — an increase that could take up to a decade to achieve. With the population both growing and aging, waiting that long simply isn’t an option. It’s time to explore alternative solutions. More NPs should be one of them.
The International Council of Nurses defines nurse-practitioners as integrating “clinical skills associated with nursing and medicine in order to assess, diagnose and manage patients”…
Published in The Globe and Mail.
Canada is facing a demographic shift that will put immense strain on our health care system and public finances.
We currently have about three working-age (18-64) adults for every senior (65+). By 2067, we will have only two working-age adults per senior. This shift will slow growth in the economy and government revenues while pushing health care expenses up.
The resulting fiscal pressure will be felt across the country, but will be much more intense in some provinces and territories than in others. For example, Newfoundland and Labrador, where the population is aging rapidly and the working-age population is falling, will face especially daunting challenges. Our projections…
Published in the Financial Post.
Canadian hospitals are capacity-constrained and expensive and therefore not the best care setting for patients who no longer need acute care and the bed that comes with it. Yet these “alternate level care” (ALC) patients accounted for 17 per cent of all acute-care bed days in Canada (excluding Quebec) in 2022-23. Reducing this unnecessary use of limited acute-care capacity could help ensure hospital beds are open for Canadians when they need them.
High ALC volume is one of the most vexing and complex health system challenges, but there are ways to address it. Relatively modest improvement could help reduce the risk of hospital bed shortages. ALC occupancy, which ranges from 14.5 to 26.1…
For decades, pharmacare has been a day late and a dollar short. How much did Bill C-64 change that?
Very few Canadians have no drug insurance, but a much larger number probably need more coverage. The lack of an integrated national drug system limits our ability to describe the unmet need, and this need is as important for that cohort as hospital and medical insurance is for everyone.
The new pharmacare bill, released Feb. 29, has “the aim of continuing to work toward the implementation of national universal pharmacare.” At the onset, it proposes universal, no-cost access to selected diabetes and contraception drugs and devices, along with work on a new national formulary, refinement of today’s bulk purchasing strategy,…
