We can’t afford to ignore this Provincial Ministers of Health and Ministers of Finance seek to “bend the health care cost curve” but year after year, provincial budgets bend the cost curve in the wrong direction, adding billions of dollars to provincial health spending. In fact, we’ve doubled spending on our medical treatment system in […]
In the recent Saskatchewan budget, the Moe government made the surprise announcement that it would slowly phase out a rental housing assistance program known as the Saskatchewan Rental Housing Supplement. Given current rental housing market realities, the government ought to have done the complete opposite and expanded the program. That’s because high vacancy rates create […]
For many of us, the events on Monday in Toronto introduced a new word into our vocabulary: “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. The 25-year-old Toronto area man accused of killing 10 people after a van plowed into a busy sidewalk apparently self-identified as an “incel.” In a Facebook post, Alek Minassian stated: “The Incel Rebellion has […]
Bill C-75 reforms too little, too late to respond to domestic violence A woman is killed by her current or former partner every six days in Canada. Indigenous women are killed by their intimate partners at a rate eight times higher. In Peel (Toronto) alone, five women were killed in January 2018 — the […]
Indigenous peoples are “Inuwak,” Peoples of the Land. We have a spiritual relationship with our mother earth; our food is from the land and is intrinsically related to our cultural and spiritual way of life. Food not only nourishes us physically, it impacts our mental attitude and is an essential part of many of our […]
Why it’s critical we use gender transformative approaches for the health workforce in Canada Sometimes an issue can be so pervasive that it is rendered nearly invisible. Take for instance the gender of the health workforce. Women comprise 82 per cent of health workers in Canada, in contrast to 47 per cent in the total labour […]
What started as pilot project by two frustrated doctors is evolving into standard practice as more jurisdictions, including the Ontario government, get on board. Dr. Clare Liddy and Dr. Erin Keely share their story – and their lessons learned along the way. Dr. Clare Liddy is a Tier 2 Chair, Associate Professor and Clinical Investigator […]
As clinicians, we are bound by professionalism and our ethical responsibilities to do no harm and to do what we can to address the pain and suffering of our patients. When powerful pain relieving opioid medications were introduced a few decades ago, they seemed to be a way to do both. We now know that […]
Canadian Medicare would not exist without the actions of the federal government. But in recent years, there has been an atrophy of the imagination about Ottawa’s role in health policy, as if federal transfer payments to the provinces and territories were the beginning and the end of everything. Last week, we submitted a report to […]
It’s been a dozen years since healthcare apology laws came to Canada – but do they work? My introduction to the complex and emotional world of adverse events in healthcare occurred in 2001 when I chaired a committee to review an inquest report into the tragic deaths of twelve infants in a paediatric surgery program […]
