What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Regions
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL)
unknownFootball (CFL)
unknownBaseball
unknownBasketball
unknownSoccer
unknown💻 Universities
💵 Finance / Shopping
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Social & Culture
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
I don't understand why prevention is not a priority. Free mobile vaccination clinic going to schools, workplaces, retirement community. Health professionals (PT, nurses, pharmacists) checking in by phone with patients at risk of hospitalization. More accessible and cheaper MRI/CTs for common high risk groups, without the need of multiple referrals.
Those are cost effective measures that can keep many patients out of hospitalization, especially preventable ones.
I think a lot of it boils down to the provinces being allowed to spend transfer payments however they want to, ie: healthcare/education payments from the feds are not restricted to being used for healthcare/education. Too often you see provincial gov'ts handing out tax credits when they should be increasing taxes instead. Even a 1% increase to provincial sales tax would help ... but politicians are focused on being re-elected vs caring for the needs of everyone in their province.
Managing healthcare should not be the job of a minister chosen every 4 years. It should be a non-partisan position, chosen maybe by the government but mainly based on competence and track record.
In the US, Powell and Yellen chaired the federal reserve under both Democratic and Republican governments, not because they were elected for this position, but because they have worked at various levels of government and industry.
On the other hand, this scenario cannot happen in Canada since the ministers are all elected, so unless economists and doctors are running and get elected, they would have to choose ministers without the right qualifications. Even if a doctor is elected, they would still need to spend a considerable amount of time to participate in MP duties, or would otherwise be replaced within 4 years; this time could have been spent on actually implementing useful policies.
Fortunately/unfortunately under Canada's Constitution the provinces hold a great deal of power over how transfer payments are spent. Up until fairly recently it wasn't a big issue, but the last few years have made it so.
My comment applies to provinces too. In Quebec, the health minister was solely educated in business, and worked exclusively in accounting and finance before joining politics. Based on that, I doubt he ever set foot in a hospital (unless as a patient), yet is expected to be making decisions impacting thousands of physicians across dozens of specialties?
Similarly, if I was a large company's CEO, I wouldn't hire a doctor who worked in a hospital their whole life to become the CFO of the company, where they would need to publish quarterly reports, draft financial statements, and submit accounting documents to government agencies. Maybe they can delegate those tasks to actual accountants, but would their decisions make sense long term? If not, why are we okay with the reverse?
I remember as a kid in the 1960s having a mobile vaccination clinic show up in our small village in SK. They even had a fluoroscope as part of the TB screening program.
That was back when there was still many living but disabled polio patients ... so people had a visible reminder of the dangers.
Now we've become blind to what was (and could still be) all because of the collective stupidity we've decided is more important than fact.
True enough. One of the teenagers on the school bus I rode required canes because of her bout with polio.
I've heard of larger workplaces having in-house vaccination clinics, but I think it's only if the employer asks. Maybe a little more outreach would help there.
We had vaccination clinics at the school when I was a student, for required immunizations like measles, polio, and so on. No reason (except personnel and funding shortages) why they couldn't do that for seasonal vaccines like flu and COVID.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The usual slate of viral threats, from influenza to respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, make this time of year particularly challenging for hospitals thanks to the ongoing influx of sick patients.
But pointing a finger at the current issues — sick patients, staff shortages, surgery backlogs, and clogged ERs — doesn't capture the deeper problem plaguing Canadian hospitals.
1 reason wait times are excessive," Dr. Paul Ratana, the medical director for the emergency department at Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital, said at a provincial press conference earlier this week.
Those patients were all essentially "stuck in hospital, with nowhere to go," said study author Aaron Jones, an assistant professor in the department of health research methods, evidence and impact at McMaster University in Hamilton and an adjunct scientist with Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
"We are facing a primary care crisis in this country, and we urgently need to find solutions," wrote Dr. Kathleen Ross, president of the Canadian Medical Association, a national physician advocacy group, in a statement this week.
Last fall, his association of ER doctors met with provincial and territorial health ministers to discuss how they could team up at a national forum this spring to find fixes for the overcrowding in emergency rooms.
The original article contains 1,379 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!