A round-up of Canadian health news, from coast to coast to coast and beyond, for Monday, December 1.
Alberta Health Minister Ron Liepert introduced on Monday the outlines of his new action plan on health, dubbed "Vision 2020." The plan includes few concrete details. Several stated goals include reevaluating the types of care provided in hospitals that could be moved to community-based clinics; promoting greater use of telehealth services; allowing emergency medical technicians to do more; expanding interdisciplinary "team-based care" models, which have been popular in Ontario; creating a longterm information technology plan for the healthcare system; and making mental health services more accessible. "Bottom line is that we need to change the role of hospitals," he told CBC News. "By making more community-based health services available, overall wait times in hospitals will be reduced, but we have to be willing to change." "But there are few specifics in the plan and no dollar figures attached to any of the changes," the Canadian Press noted.
Just a few days before releasing his Vision 2020 plan, Mr Liepert made some rather awkward comments during a speech on the current economic problems and the healthcare system at the Canadian Club of Calgary. "Somehow we've got to get Albertans to accept more personal responsibility for their behaviour. I guess I'm hopeful that if people don't have the money to spend on Jolt and booze and everything else, maybe they won't become quite as addicted," he was quoted as saying in the Calgary Herald. Most uncomfortably, however, was the suggestion that citizens might accept a smaller role for government in healthcare as a budget-cutting measure. "We're going to have some tough decisions to make in the budget coming next year and I think people are going to start to say, 'OK, maybe government shouldn't be covering everything,'" he said.
Ontario is switching over to an organ donation system called "affirmative registration," in which only the intentions of people willing to donate are recorded in a database. People who do not want to donate or are not sure if they do will not have their preference recorded from now on; if the question comes up, the agency responsible for organ donation will ask their families what their preferences were. This system is anticipated to increase the number of organs available for donation. [news release] For more details on the new system, check the frequently asked questions on Trillium Gift of Life's website.
A new plan developed by the BC government largely in consultation with pharmaceutical companies appears to sideline the province's independent drug review body, the Therapeutics Initiative. "It's very, very disconcerting," NDP health critic Adrian Dix told The Tyee. [The Tyee] In July, Dr Randall F White warned in an opinion article in the National Review of Medicine that "unbiased drug review" was "under threat."
A new Ontario project named Rainbow Health Ontario, launched in conjunction with Sherbourne Health Centre, will function as a clearinghouse for resources and support for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual health services. "This is a province-wide initiative that puts Ontario at the forefront with respect to LGBT health and equity in Canada and around the world," said Health Minister David Caplan in a release. Rainbow Health Ontario director Anna Travers said, "Despite significant improvements, LGBT people still face gaps and inequities in services. Many health care providers are uninformed about the specific health care issues of this community. RHO will help to fill that gap." George Smitherman, an openly gay MPP who served as the provincial health minister for five years until becoming the energy and infrastructure minister earlier this year, also attended the launch. In the release, he said, "Until now the LGBT community had no central place to access reliable information on health issues or services related to them." [news release]
Doctors and nurses should all get the flu shot, urged the chief public health officer of Canada, Dr David Butler-Jones.
A new Canadian Institute for Health Information report showed the ratio of women to men on the rise in all of the health professions. Among family physicians, 56% under the age of 40 are female, whereas just 16% over the age of 60 are, indicating that a huge change in the profession's gender balance is already well underway. CIHI report on Canadian physicians "Women continue to dominate in nursing, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, and their ranks are increasing in male-dominated health-care professions [such as pharmacy and medicine]," wrote the Canadian Press. Canadian Medical Association President Dr Robert Ouellet was unnerved by one of the new report's findings. "The fact that the average age within our profession has been rising for the past decade tells us that the number of retirements is going to increase - and increase rapidly - in the coming decade. We have to prepare for that," he said in a release.
A new service will soon be offered at the fertility clinic in Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, reported The Globe and Mail's Hayley Mick: help for HIV-positive parents to conceive.
A new Fraser Institute report compared Canada's healthcare system to the mixed public-private ones of European countries. According to the group's analysis of the data, Canada spends more than almost any other country in the world with a universal healthcare system, but doesn't see better outcomes. "Groups opposing reform here in Canada often resort to fear-mongering and suggestions that Canada will end up with an American-style health care system. But those groups are behind the times," said Fraser Institute director of health system performance studies Nadeem Esmail. "They don’t seem to realize that throughout Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the developed world, nations have built efficient, high-functioning health care systems by blending public and private health care. It’s time for Canada to do the same." [ (PDF)]
Nicolas Bédard, a doctor in Outaouais, Quebec, has managed to recruit doctors to take a pay cut to work at his clinic because he offers excellent work conditions. His experience should serve as a lesson to politicians looking to improve their physician recruitment and retention strategies, he says. [Le Droit]
Canadian social justice activist Stephen Lewis demanded that Canada honour its responsibility to protect the citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo who are being killed and displaced by the ongoing civil war at an alarming rate. "It's the silence from Canada that is absolutely revolting," Mr Lewis said. Congolese women, in particular, are in danger because of the widespread incidence of rape as a military tactic. He spoke in Toronto recently with The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler and Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, a winner of a 2008 United Nations Human Rights Award who runs a hospital in eastern Congo where he treats women attacked and raped in the war. "This is the worst kind of war one can imagine," Dr Mukwege said. "Because it's beyond the idea of a classical war where soldiers and armies are fighting each other. Now, the battlefield has changed to the bodies of women. It's a war on women's bodies."
In the latest Toronto-based Joint Centre for Bioethics newsletter, Faiza Rab and Bob Parke describe a representative case that demonstrates the ethical problems in end-of-life care when a patient has an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, designed to shock a patient's heart back into an acceptable rhythm in case of a serious problem. In the case they describe, a patient, named Mike, learned that an ICD can temporarily prevent people from dying when they're ready to go, resulting in a painful series of shocks before one's demise. He asked his doctor to remove the device, but the doctor refused, "erroneously believing that he would be guilty of directly causing his patient's death." [ (PDF)]
Online doctor rating websites like RateMDs, which has become very popular in Canada, are a load of garbage, wrote Dr Kent Sepkowicz in Slate. His main complaint was that there were hardly any reviews for most of the doctors he looked up -- including himself. So he decided to add some of his own. Lo and behold, Dr Sepkowicz has some great ratings online now.
Men in management positions derive prestige and command respect as a result of their girth, a pair of University of Calgary researchers found in a new study. Their research asked why class status and BMI were associated with one another in men.
Doctors in Switzerland will be permitted to prescribe heroin to addicts after voters elected to legalize the practice in a referendum.