New health-care funding will modernize system

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/02/2023 (940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced new health-care funding that would see Ottawa shift $196 billion to the provinces and territories over the next 10 years. The federal government has made its offer, and now the provincial premiers will have to respond.

It’s not as much as the provinces wanted. And it does come with strings, something some provinces, such as Quebec, were against originally. But for now, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested, it’s a good start, a down payment on fixing a broken system.

Anyone watching also recognizes this is a big win for the Liberals federally — and if Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson can fast-track the money into her ailing health-care system, a win for the Conservatives in this province, too.

Canadians are also winners, as as the strings attached to this new agreement will ensure the transparency we deserve.

The agreement comes with $17 billion in additional funding for the Canada Health Transfer, and a guaranteed increase of five per cent annually for five years, along with $25 billion for family health care, mental health and addictions, hiring more doctors and nurses, eliminating surgical and diagnostic backlogs, and instituting national standardized health information and digital tools.

The latter requirement means our health-care data collection will be modernized. Canada has limited data to help locate and understand the weak points in its health-care system.

This new agreement also asks that digital patient records be shared between jurisdictions and health-care providers. A pandemic has underscored why this is necessary.

Almost a year ago, the Canadian College of Health Information Management released an expert advisory report suggesting that “the systemic fragmentation of health data, ineffective pan-Canadian health data governance and antiquated policies” have prevented timely data sharing. The report argued if better data had been in place, lives could have been saved during the pandemic.

Dr. Vivek Goel, chaiperson of the advisory group, wrote: “Significant gaps remain in Canada’s health-data ecosystem, from timely reporting of basic data on individual cases and outbreaks, to genomic surveillance for new variants, or assessment of vaccine coverage, safety and effectiveness in real time.”

It’s time for Canada’s health care to arrive in the digital age. (First step: get rid of the fax machines.)

Earlier this summer, the National Institute on Ageing, based at Toronto Metropolitan University, had to pull the plug on a longitudinal study it was conducting on COVID-19 cases, outbreaks and deaths at long-term care homes in the form of a map, with a summary for each province and territory.

The reason? Provinces were no longer making enough information public about the spread of the virus in the sector.

This type of information is necessary, but provinces seem to be reluctant to share it for fear of a public-relations nightmare. Canadians have the right to this information; more importantly, it provides opportunities to pinpoint areas of potential concern.

This new agreement is the next “big thing” after the 2004 Health Accord — the so-called “fix for a generation.” Brought in by former prime minister Paul Martin, it promised to reduce wait times and improve patient care with a $41-billion injection over a decade. It provided stable funding through a 10-year spending plan that boosted federal transfers by six per cent each year.

The problem was the increased funding didn’t necessarily result in improvements in wait times, and with no reporting on how the federal money was used, there was no accountability.

The Health Accord was shelved in 2011 by the Harper government, which opted instead for simplicity. Then-finance minister Jim Flaherty explained his government wanted a funding plan that would avoid the lengthy back-and-forth negotiations required to finalize the Health Accord. The Conservative government’s new formula saw the Canada Health Transfer increase in tandem with the gross domestic product, with a guaranteed floor of three per cent per year.

This was criticized by many for hurting provinces that were already struggling and for ignoring the special needs of those with aging populations.

Once again, because the government had assumed a hands-off policy on what it perceived to be a provincial responsibility, there were concerns about accountability and data collection. In 2013, the government announced it was winding down funding for the Health Council of Canada, which was responsible in part for monitoring wait times. That monitoring is now being done by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, but the institute doesn’t have a mandate to propose reforms based on those data.

This new agreement, should it go through, will be a huge gain for stable funding in health. It will be a win for Trudeau and Stefanson — both facing elections in the near future. But more importantly, it will be a major victory in ensuring transparency and modernizing Canada’s health-care system. As patients, we will win.

Shannon Sampert is a communications consultant and former politics and perspectives editor at the Winnipeg Free Press.

shannon@mediadiva.ca