Alberta behind on leveraging art in healthcare The long-promised new Calgary Cancer Centre is finally breaking ground at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary. The $1.4 billion state-of-the-art facility will have 12 radiation vaults, 160 in-patient beds, more than 100 patient exam rooms and more than 100 chemotherapy chairs. But will patients still feel like they […]
Tis’ the food bank season ’Tis the season when everyone wants to help support their local food bank initiatives. But “sharing the season” always poses a tough question for me: How do we help our neighbours when, according to Canada Without Poverty, there are 4.9 million neighbours to help? The number of Canadians in need […]
It’s time we stepped up our system of drug surveillance If you take prescription medications, what conditions do you take them for? Are they working for you? Have you experienced any negative side-effects from them? It may surprise you to know that answers to these critical health questions aren’t well documented for most Canadians. Yet […]
At last, Canada stands with other developed nations when the federal government launched our first National Housing Strategy (NHS) this week. While this historic step forward represents what many activists have been calling on for decades, is it time to rejoice? Will the staggering $40 billion dollars promised over 10 years amend nearly a quarter […]
On the same day that the Minister of Finance, Bill Morneau, clarified the federal government’s proposals to limit “income sprinkling” as a way for high income owners of private companies to reduce their taxes, the Senate Finance Committee released its report recommending that it all be scrapped. Instead, the Senate Committee recommended that the government […]
The most recent data on Canadian children with disabilities is almost a decade old “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children, including their health, safety, material security, education and socialization and their sense of being loved, valued and included in the families and societies into which […]
There’s no denying that the food environment influences the diets of Canadian families, and that food industry marketing is part of that environment. Canadian children are now developing chronic diseases that were almost exclusively seen in adults when I went to medical school a few decades back. There has been a big shift in our […]
Le sommeil ne vient pas toujours facilement à mesure que l’on avance en âge. Prenez l’exemple d’Ilsa, 78 ans, récemment devenue veuve. Depuis le décès de son mari, son sommeil s’est dégradé. Lors d’une récente hospitalisation, le bruit et les lumières éblouissantes de l’unité de soins l’ont épuisée et rendue irritable. On lui a prescrit une […]
Interviews with Dr. Robyn Tamblyn and Dr. Jenna Wong Medications can be life-saving. But they are only as good as our knowledge about them. The time is right for a national drug surveillance system to kept better track of our experiences with medications. Jenna Wong recently received her PhD from the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics […]
On World AIDS Day, we are seeing red. The red ribbon has long been a potent symbol of HIV/AIDS activism, signifying anger at the bureaucratic red tape that, in the 1980s, delayed release of life-saving treatments to people living with HIV/AIDS. Treatment access and effectiveness have since improved for some living with HIV/AIDS (at least […]
