The three determinants of optimal health care are access, quality, and affordability. Prior to the pandemic, our resources in Canada were strained as we struggled to meet the demands of an aging population and lacked the infrastructure and resources to provide an integrated, efficient care model. We now look back to 2019 and for all the challenges health care faced, those were the good times compared to the further strains on health care as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Post-pandemic wait times for non-emergent care, surgical procedures, and specialist visits are even more excessively long and unreasonable. Emergency rooms remain overcrowded with hallway medicine due to a lack of beds. Health-care workers increasingly feel the effects of burnout, with less work satisfaction and never-ending demands on their time. The bureaucratic and administrative process has never been more of a challenge and a time-wasting frustration. Current plans to resolve these issues are yet again a bandaid applied to a deep wound. 

We need fewer administrative staff 

Canada historically has had an inadequate number of hospital and ICU beds and low numbers of physicians and nurses. While physician numbers may superficially seem reasonable, many physicians work fewer hours than ever because of family obligations or a greater focus on quality of life. Physicians are seen by governments as cost centres driving up health care utilization and cost of care, rather than providing an essential service to patients whose health is something we value greatly. 

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranks health care availability for 38 participating countries. In one of the metrics, Canada ranks 23rd in physicians per capita with only 2.8 practicing physicians per 1,000 people, similar to the U.S. but much lower than most European countries, especially those with universal care.^{1Doctors: Total, Per 1 000 inhabitants, 2020 or latest available https://data.oecd.org/healthres/doctors.htm} In another metric, we rank 10th in nurses per capita at 9.98/1,000. The ability to not restrict routine health care during the different waves of the pandemic required adequate ICU bed capacity. It is no surprise that Canada struggled greatly with only 12.9 ICU beds per 100,000 population compared to 25.8 for the U.S. and 33.9 for Germany. 

Aetna Health reviewed the relative increase in U.S. physicians and health-care administrators between 1975 and 2010 and showed that physician numbers increased 150 percent—a rate in keeping with the increase in population.^{2The rise (and rise) of the healthcare administrator https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-management/expert-forum-rise-and-rise-healthcare-administrator} During the same period, the number of health-care administrators increased by a whopping 3200 percent. While some of the increase was necessary due to the increasing complexity of care and many new regulatory requirements, it represented a huge increase in non-direct patient care costs and added layers of bureaucracy. A similar situation exists in Canada. Susan Martinuk in her book on Canada’s health care crisis^{3Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis https://www.amazon.ca/Patients-Risk-Exposing-Canadas-Health-care/dp/1777657741} noted that Germany, which has excellent health care, has one-tenth the number of health care administrators, one for every 15,454 citizens versus one for every 1,415 citizens here in Canada. It is hard to see how this large difference is justifiable.

Health-care spending 

The amount of money spent on health care doesn’t always relate to better outcomes. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimated that U.S. health-care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, over the previous year, reaching $4.1 trillion, about 19.7 percent of GDP and $12,530 USD per person.^{4NHE Fact Sheet https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NHE-Fact-Sheet} The potential availability of excellent care is unevenly distributed. Health care spending for Black and Latino people was much lower than for White people, and this imbalance may partly account for poorer outcomes in lower-income individuals with less access to quality care. Thus despite high levels of spending the U.S. trails greatly in metrics such as infant mortality and life expectancy. 

Canada now spends about 12.5 percent of GDP on health care,^{5Health spending https://www.cihi.ca/en/topics/health-spending} an amount similar to Germany and Switzerland. While we need to spend more in the future for greater access to quality care, it is also essential to better allocate how we spend it. 

New paradigms of care

Canadians continue to view universal health care as a highly important and valued right. There are important short and long-term measures needed to fix and preserve universal health care. We need to reduce unnecessary visits, decrease bureaucracy, fix wait times, increase efficiency and increase access. This requires a shift towards a greater focus on supporting those providing direct patient care such as physicians, nurses, and nurse practitioners, and less on bureaucracy and administrative costs. In addition to training more nurses and physicians, we need to allow highly qualified foreign-trained physicians to have an easier path to active practice. 

Canada already has models for private care, such as concierge services, that have not impacted universal care, as well as allowing direct payment for many uninsured services. Some additional private care will not be harmful. The long wait times for essential imaging tests can be reduced by supplemental insurance without depleting universal access to timely care. 

Improving ambulatory care 

As development director of a hospital-based imaging centre, I experienced firsthand the bureaucracy and extra cost associated with mandated hospital-grade ambulatory clinic and imaging space. Most ambulatory care should be provided in high quality, efficiently run, less expensive commercial space, either purpose-built or rented. This will reduce capital costs of construction and operating costs and improve the patient experience. 

Develop dedicated specialty surgical centres

Current long wait times for many surgical procedures are due to a lack of allocated OR time and guaranteed scheduling. Hospital operating room time is limited and highly competitive. As a result, highly trained surgeons with large patient backlogs have confided to me that they sit idly by, unable to book procedures and operate efficiently because of this challenge. One important solution is the creation of dedicated surgical centres of excellence. A model already exists in Toronto for cataract operations.

The Kensington Eye Institute is an excellent example of a highly efficient, stand-alone, not-for-profit ophthalmology centre that provides state-of-the-art day surgery in an out-of-hospital setting. Such models would also work well for orthopedic and other surgeries that can be done as day surgery. 

New care models can improve care & reduce cost

Reducing current hallway medicine is a problem that requires complex, innovative solutions. We can reduce hospital ER visits by greater availability of 24-hour urgent care clinics. Better triage of who needs to visit a hospital can be achieved by broader use of nurse practitioner telehealth calls, as well as the use of artificial intelligence-based decision making about which level of care is required. Such a program has already been developed by an Israeli company, Diagnostic Robotics. 

A number of in-home care models have been developed primarily in the U.S. that can be trialed in Canada. Dispatch Health has a care model that sends emergency care trained teams to patients’ homes armed with mobile blood work labs, IV fluids, nebulizers, and much of the other equipment found in ERs that are used to treat patients. Tufts Medical Center in Boston has partnered with Medically Home to test hospital-level acute care in patients’ homes. The Mayo Clinic has an Advanced Care at Home program that provides 24/7 access to a care team of physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants as required. At-home equipment includes a telephone connecting directly to your care team, a personal emergency response bracelet, vital sign monitoring devices, internet connectivity and mobile imaging testing, and at-home IV services. 

Such in-home care can potentially reduce admissions to the hospital, as well as allow for earlier discharge, shortening the length of stay and reducing high in-hospital costs. 

Improve access to care for under-serviced areas. 

A hub and spoke model^{6The hub-and-spoke organization design: an avenue for serving patients well https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-017-2341-x} can bring integrated care teams to remote areas. This can be achieved by increased virtual care, locally-based nurse practitioners, and increased use of telemedicine via secure smartphone links. Mobile health teams can also visit periodically to provide required in-person specialized care or determine the need to transfer care to an urban area. 

In summary, high-quality universal health care can be preserved with extra funding targeted to those providing direct patient contact and the use of cost-saving innovation. We need to develop integrated care teams that reduce the need for emergency and in-hospital care. We also need to use hybrid in-person and virtual care models that can broaden ambulatory care, making it more efficient for everyone and also more accessible to remote areas. Models for much of this already exist and we can leverage existing experience to meet our needs. We need governments and health care organizations that are finally willing to walk the walk not just talk the talk. 

Now that the Ontario election is over, the question is: what next?

It’s clear that the Ford government has a mandate but it’s less clear what that mandate is for. The Progressive Conservative Party’s modest policy platform essentially affirmed the government’s pre-election budget^{12022 Ontario Budget: Ontario’s Plan to Build https://budget.ontario.ca/2022/index.html} which will be effectuated in short order. That necessarily leaves the better part of four years for which to develop and implement a governing agenda. 

Answering this question is somewhat complicated by the fact that the incoming government’s electoral coalition is broad and diverse. It needs to pursue a set of policies that speak to the party’s core conservative voters as well as newer ones in Toronto and Thunder Bay. 

One source of potential commonality regardless of ideology or postal code is what American conservative thinker Reihan Salam calls “quality-of-life conservatism.” His basic premise is that conservatives ought to commit themselves to a set of issues that cumulatively influence the public’s overall sense of its quality of life. 

While there may be different emphases in different parts of the province—in Toronto, for instance, a quality-of-life conservatism may emphasize housing and transportation compared to Thunder Bay where it might focus more on good jobs and broadband access—the common theme of improving the quality of life of Ontarians can provide philosophical scaffolding for the Ford government’s forthcoming four-year agenda. 

The basic foundation of Salam’s quality-of-life conservatism is public safety. Ontario Conservatives should continue to generally oppose the Trudeau government’s and now the Supreme Court’s decarceral agenda and more recent calls for the decriminalization of hard drugs. As we’ve seen in American cities such as New York and San Francisco, this soft-on-crime progressivism is bound to lead to rising criminality and disorder. 

Instead, the goal of stronger province-wide public safety ought to start with more and better policing, an openness to credible firearms reform (including tougher criminal sanctions for crimes involving guns), and following the Kenney government’s drug rehabilitation alternative to the Left’s failed (and morally dubious) harm reduction strategy.

A second pillar of a quality-of-life conservatism would prioritize the adoption of the province’s Housing Affordability Task Force’s recommendations^{2Housing Affordability Task Force report https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force-report} to reduce red tape, expedite housing construction, and enable new and different forms of housing, including laneway homes and other types that fill the so-called “missing middle.” 

Addressing the province’s housing affordability crisis is not only a key to improving quality of life, but it can also unlock greater economic activity, including higher rates of innovation and productivity, by enabling highly-skilled workers to cluster in Toronto and the province’s other dynamic cities. 

Another pillar of quality-of-life conservatism would be greater ambition in health-care reform. The Ford government has been more hesitant than many of its provincial peers in leveraging private delivery to address Ontario’s massive pandemic-induced backlog of surgeries and diagnostic tests. The Ontario Medical Association now estimates that there’s a backlog of more than 20 million health-care services across the province. These protracted delays, which lead to economic costs as well as individual pain and suffering, are an obvious threat to one’s quality of life. The Ford government should therefore put a broader set of reforms on the table including adopting the OMA’s proposal for a network of community surgical centres to carry out routine surgeries (such as hips and knees) outside of hospitals.^{3Integrated Ambulatory Centres: A Three-Stage Approach to Addressing Ontario’s Critical Surgical and Procedural Wait Times https://www.oma.org/uploadedfiles/oma/media/public/addressing-wait-times-proposal.pdf}

More and different forms of child-care should also be on the government’s agenda. The province’s inadequate child-care supply which is driving up the costs for young families, particularly in major cities, is due at least in part to a panoply of provincial regulations. As the Ford government starts to implement the federal-provincial agreement on child-care, it should conduct a review of its own regulatory framework in the name of enabling child-care pluralism to flourish in the province. The current supply-demand disequilibrium in Ontario’s constellation of child-care options should be understood as a government failure. 

Prior to the election, the Ford government had placed a major emphasis on public infrastructure investment including broadband and subways. This should continue in the new mandate but with a greater focus on reducing construction red tape and leveraging new and cheaper technologies. 

On broadband, the government should follow Quebec’s lead by extending high-quality coverage through satellite technology based on some combination of Canadian-based Telesat and Elon Musk’s Starlink. It’s the cheapest and fastest means of achieving greater equity when comes to internet access across the province. As for more traditional infrastructure, the emphasis must be on translating the campaign slogan of “Get it Done” into a practical agenda of regulatory reform so as to enable faster and cheaper infrastructure construction in Ontario. 

One interesting idea that the Ford government might explore as part of a quality-of-life conservatism is reforming the province’s student grants such that children start to receive provincial contributions into a post-secondary savings account even before they’re ready to apply for university or college. Evidence shows that pushing up access to public post-secondary subsidies can lead to higher rates of eventual enrolment and attainment.^{4Post-Secondary Access: Jennifer Robson on Better Life Chances for Ontario’s Children https://on360.ca/policy-papers/post-secondary-access/} The Ford government should experiment with such a model in the name of greater social mobility. 

A more controversial pillar would be to return to the government’s previous attempts at reforming the province’s system of social assistance. Presently too many recipients languish on Ontario Works, which has basically become a program of perpetual and inadequate sustenance rather than a catapult into stable employment. Programmatic reforms (including for instance clarifying eligibility between Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program) could then enable the government to strengthen core support for those who remain on disability benefits. 

There are no doubt various other policy areas and reforms (including Labour Minister Monte McNaughton’s highly ambitious agenda) that fit under the auspices of a quality-of-life conservatism. The key at this stage is to erect some philosophical scaffolding around such an agenda before starting to build out a comprehensive set of policies. The Ford government’s upcoming Speech from the Throne is a key opportunity to begin this heavy lifting. 

The Premier and his team should see it as a moment to articulate the basis of a quality-of-life conservatism in order to bring expression to their impressive yet ill-defined electoral mandate. Improving the quality of life of Ontarians is a mandate worth winning for.