Most Canadians would likely agree that those who need potentially life-saving prescription medications should have ready access to them.
Climate change has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the biggest health threat of the 21st century.
Over a year ago, I was invited to celebrate World Autism Awareness Day on Parliament Hill. It was attended by a dozen or more Senators from both major parties, political staffers and invited guests mostly from an assortment of autism non-profit organizations. I expected a somewhat predictable ‘feel good’ event about how far we’ve come and how far we have still to go. But an hour later there weren’t many dry eyes in the chamber.
National Medicare Week has just passed, buoyed with optimism as a fresh-faced government takes the reins in Ottawa — elected partly on a promise of renewed federal leadership on health care. Yet these “sunny ways” are overcast by recent developments at the provincial level that entrench and legitimize two-tier care. Saskatchewan has just enacted a licensing […]
One morning, the media headline pronounces Canada’s health system should model that found in the Netherlands; the next week, we should follow Germany’s example, and yet another says Australia is leading the pack. Then there are the inevitable comparisons to the U.S. health system.
Canadian governments have done little to address the crisis faced by autism families across the country. This sentiment was true in 2007 when it was put forward in the cross-party Senate report on the state of funding for the treatment of autism in Canada, aptly titled, Pay Now or Pay Later. And until recently, this sentiment could be used to sum up the role of the federal government which has largely left the crisis up to provincial ministries to manage.
A young child arrives at the hospital emergency room in respiratory distress, his asthma worsened by smoke exposure. An elder has uncontrolled blood pressure because there wasn’t time to get her medications when the evacuation orders came through.
Every week a new study on autism seems to surface, and too often, there are errors or critical omissions in some of the media coverage on the topic.
Normally provincial medical association elections are not national news. The one vote difference between first and second place in the race for president of the Doctors of BC – later declared a tie after a recount – might be enough to grab people’s attention.
A long-running dispute between Dr. Brian Day, the co-owner of Cambie Surgeries Corporation and the British Columbia government may finally be resolved in the BC Supreme Court this year — and the ruling could transform the Canadian health system from coast to coast.
