Canadian Premiers meet to discuss health care

 At a meeting in Victoria B.C. Canada's premiers and territorial leaders are trying to hammer out a common policy on health care. The Conservative federal government has announced that it will guarantee health-care funding increases right up to the 2016,2017 year. Up until then the yearly increases were set at 6 per cent.
   After that, increases will be related to the growth of GDP but increases will continue at the rate of at least three per cent per annum. These increases were announced unilaterally and without consultation with the provinces as is usual before the federal government announces policy.
   Premier Jean Charest of Quebec was angry that there was no consultation with provinces on the question of funding but this unilateral declaration by the Harper federal government. Charest noted:"We have always in Canada, because of our federal system of government, had a dialogue on this, an exchange of information, a dialogue and decisions were made" Charest wants to hold talks with prime minister Harper on future funding. The present accord does not expire until 2014.
   Future funding will be per capita after 2014. Some provinces object to this in particular British Columbia where there are many seniors. Seniors cost the system much more. The situation does not look positive for health care in Canada. The federal government is reactionary. Although the Conservatives pledge their undying support for universal health care both they and many of the provinces will be looking to privatize more of the system to support their business friends. The system is likely to change so that the the level of services will not be the same in all provinces. No doubt there will be an offloading of costs so far as possible from the provinces to the individual. Rich provinces will no doubt have better health care systems and poorer provinces will struggle to provide basic care. Manitoba Premier Greg Sellinger said:  "The underlying principle is to offer comparable levels of service even if they are different, in such a way that it respects the overall framework of the Canada Health Act," Sellinger is an New Democratic Party premier supposedly on the left. Per capita funding will never achieve the goal he outlines.
    The premier of Nova Scotia Darell Dexter also NDP put the matter much more realistically: "Equal funding is not necessarily equitable funding," "This is the problem. We have 16 per cent of our population currently over the age of 65 in our province. We're going to move from 16 per cent over the age of 65 to almost 30 per cent over the next 20 years," Poorer provinces such as Nova Scotia will simply not have the funds to provide adequate care for an aging population if funding is based solely on so much per person. For much more see this CBC article.

The five-point health care fix.

Somewhat refreshing to see an article that makes sensible recommendations for health care reform without starting with the premise that what we need to do is privatize as much as possible and offload costs from the government to the individual health care consumer. While rising health costs are certainly a problem there is no need to slash coverage. Certainly the US system is very much more expensive than ours and less equitable with poorer overall results. Ours may not be the best system in the world but for the ordinary citizen it is superior to the US and ranked much higher by the WHO. I am always amazed when US politicians claim that the US system is the best health care system in the world. Certainly it is a very good system if you have lots of money for high quality health insurance but otherwise it is not that great at all and it costs the US taxpayer much more than most advanced capitalist countries pay for equal or better quality care.

The five-point health fix
It’s not impossible to save taxpayers money without sacrificing high-quality care for Canadians

André Picard
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

With an increasing array of new drugs, technologies and specialization, and Canada's seemingly insatiable appetite for services, the cost of delivering health care has increased relentlessly. From 1975 to 2009, it rose from $12.2-billion to $183.1-billion.

In that period, the only time year-over-year spending dipped was from 1993 to 1996, when the provinces, saddled with massive deficits, took Draconian measures and public expenditures fell 8 per cent. But the tactics used – laying off nurses, shutting hospitals, imposing across-the-board cuts on programs and decentralizing administration – resulted in longer wait times for patients and were deeply unpopular.

Because of the backlash, governments reversed course and, over the next four years, spent like there was no tomorrow – 18 per cent from 1996 to 2000.

Today, with recessionary pressures and health accounting for an ever-larger part of public spending, there is a new push to control costs. So how can governments do the seemingly impossible: rein in spending while ensuring universal, high-quality care? Here are some strategies worth trying.

Predictable, stable funding

The pattern in Canada has been to impose dramatic cuts and then make huge reinvestments, creating administrative whiplash and inconsistency in service delivery. Health-care providers need to live within their means but, to do so, they need to know their budgets. Under the 10-year Canada Health Transfer, funding from Ottawa to the provinces and territories has been clear and predictable (though some would say inadequate). Provinces need to provide the same clarity to regions, hospitals and other providers. While it does not serve the public good to be indifferent to costs, when there are cuts they should be targeted and surgical, not reactionary and willy-nilly.

Human-resource planning

The single biggest expense is labour – personnel accounts for about 80 per cent of total costs. The generous contracts signed with physicians and nurses in recent years and the large influx of practitioners (5,000 new physicians in the past five years, for example) have created built-in inflation that will make it difficult to keep costs down. At some point, Canadians will have to ask: “What's the right price to pay for labour?” The answer is not necessarily to cut salaries – doing so would set off a war with powerful unions and professional associations – but to ensure we get value for money with a rational division of labour. In Canada's health system, we have a lot of high-wage employees doing relatively mundane tasks.

Better co-ordination of care

We don't tend to use people's skills efficiently. There is a lot of territorialism, a good part of it driven by funding methods that encourage volume rather than reward quality. We invest massively in health professionals but spend relatively little on support services. From the patient perspective, the care is disjointed and there is a lack of continuity. We need more interdisciplinary delivery of care – or teamwork to use a more simple term. Patients also have to be more active participants in their care, not just passive recipients.

Sort out drug funding

The fastest-growing expense in the system is the cost of prescription drugs. But which ones are covered when and where varies wildly, depending on a person's province, age, income and the place where he or she is treated. There is a strong argument to be made that creating a national (not federal) pharmacare plan – or at the very least, a catastrophic drug plan – would ultimately save money, as well as make the system more fair. In the meantime, provinces need to do a better job of ensuring drugs are prescribed appropriately, and of negotiating better prices with pharmaceutical companies (particularly generics). Canada has a National Pharmaceuticals Strategy, one that looks good on paper, but it has not been fully implemented.

Focus on quality and safety

There is a lot of rhetoric about cutting waste and bureaucracy but the reality is that the health system is pretty lean. That said, record-keeping is poor, transitions within the system (say, from a family doctor to a specialist, or from critical care to home care) are often pained, and we are slow to implement the latest evidence-based care. The result is a system where efficiency, quality and safety are not what they should be – and, just as important, where there can be marked variations from one institution or one region to the next. Over the long term, improving quality and safety is where the true savings will be found. But doing so requires significant investments, in electronic health records, in data collection and in monitoring mechanisms.

Postscript

Despite popular mythology to this effect, health-care spending in Canada is not out of control: After adjusting for inflation and population growth, spending increased 2.5 per cent last year.

Still, the political environment, post-recession, is such that Canadians are more conscious of the need to control costs, and doing so is wise to ensure sustainability.

But the prescription for what ails our health system is not simply throwing more money into it or, conversely, slashing and burning.

Rather, we need wise investment in strategic reforms to ensure that the system is organized in a manner that ensure the most appropriate care is delivered at the right time, in the right place and to the right patients.

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Wait Time Alliance calls for new medical benchmarks

As noted the wait times might become "ideal" wait times rather than maximum wait times or medically reasonable wait times. The article gives no information as to how well the earlier designated benchmarks have been met.


Wait Time Alliance calls for new medical benchmarks
Last Updated: Monday, November 26, 2007 | 11:57 AM ET
CBC News
The government needs to commit to reducing lengthy wait times for medical services outside the five priority areas established three years ago, says a report released Monday by the Wait Time Alliance.

The group calls for the establishment of wait-time benchmarks for five additional medical specialities: emergency care, psychiatric care, plastic surgery, gastroenterology and anesthesiology. These have been developed by the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, the Canadian Society of Plastic Surgeons, and the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology.

The emergency ward of Hull hospital. The report calls for changes to emergency wait times.
(CBC) A 10-year Plan to Strengthen Health Care was signed by first ministers in September 2004 and included commitments to reduce wait times for diagnostic imaging, hip and knee replacement, radiation oncology, cataract surgery and cardiac care.

"They should be viewed as health system performance goals that reflect a broad consensus on medically reasonable wait times," reads the report. "Nevertheless, for the most part, these benchmarks should be viewed as 'maximum acceptable' wait-times, not 'ideal' wait times."

The new wait-time benchmarks are:

Emergency care – Level 1 (e.g. cardiac arrest): immediate; Level 2 (e.g. chest pain): less than 15 minutes; Level 3 (e.g. moderate asthma): less than 30 minutes; Level 4 (e.g. minor trauma): less than 60 minutes; Level 5 (sprains): under 120 minutes.
Psychiatric care – Emergency cases: within 24 hours to see a psychiatrist; Urgent cases: within 24 hours to see a family doctor and within 1-2 weeks see to a psychiatrist; Scheduled cases: within 1 week to see a family doctor and within 2-4 weeks to see a psychiatrist.
Plastic surgery – Emergency cases: within 24 hours (e.g. burns, infections, hand and facial trauma); Urgent cases: within 2-8 weeks (e.g. most malignant neoplastic conditions, some cranofacial conditions); Scheduled cases: within 2-6 months (e.g. congenital abnormalities, wounds, elective hand procedures).
Gastroenterology – Emergency cases: within 24 hours; Urgent cases: within two weeks; Scheduled cases: within 6 months.
Anesthesiology: Acute neuropathic pain of less than 6 months duration: 30 days; Acute lumbar disc protrusion: 3 months; Cancer pain: 14 days; Subacute chronic pain in an adult of working age where intervention may improve function: 3 months; Other types of chronic pain: 6 months
"What we need now is a similar commitment on the part of governments to act now to fulfil their promises to meet deadlines around the initial five clinical areas identified in the 10-year Plan to Strengthen Health Care and to take action in these newly-identified areas," Dr. Colin Macmillan, past president of the Canadian Medical Association, said Monday in a release.