The COVID-19 pandemic has been the greatest shock to Canada’s healthcare system in more than a century. While it has managed to avoid serious risk of collapse, areas of institutional weakness and sluggish response have been laid bare. Improvement in care and access is certainly possible, and examining where and how we might promote better outcomes in our system should be a major priority exiting the pandemic. After all, how can we spend so much on health, yet still fail so badly?
Tackling this topic at the Canadian Strong and Free Network Conference 2021 in early April, the Hon. Tony Clement, a News Forum host and former federal minister of health, convened a panel to discuss how we might transform Canada’s healthcare system post-COVID. Joining him were Joanna Baron of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (and a Hub contributing writer), Peter St. Onge of the Montreal Economic Institute, and Walter Robinson of Delphic Research.
“Despite this government’s predilection to this command and control model, it is really innovation that holds out the most hope for healthcare, and certainly we’ve seen in the pandemic that it is innovation that has given us the vaccines that at least offers a partial way out,” says Clement.
Robinson agrees that innovative medicines, medical technologies, pharmaceutical companies, and even big data will all be crucial in dealing with the long-term physical and mental health effects of COVID. Incorporating these into our system may be tricky, though.
“The challenge that our healthcare system has is that it’s still a hospital driven, 1950s, acute-institutional paradigm.” Adding the modern innovative capacity to those institutions that will be required moving forward is tough. Federal, provincial, and local health officials will need to figure out how to work in partnership with both industry and patients to modernize, he explains.
The problem is we have the seeds of innovation, but we do not have the soil necessary to develop it because of the governmental monopoly of our system, adds Baron.
Watch the full panel event here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39psnuaMt_o&list=PLLINPaDXV8Iw9cfdvgZWOhJSygqAV_i0l&index=3
