Healthcare Issue in Canada Perspective of a Future Medical Student

¶ … future of health care delivery in Canada, the country that you intend to practice medicine.

The Canadian health care's most significant issue is it's disconnect of communication between medical practitioners and patients, on the one hand, and the different hierarchies and departments of medical care on the other.

The Primary Care Advisory Committee, for instance, reported last year that primary care services are becoming more fragmented with fewer doctors being sufficiently motivated enough to involve themselves in the full range of services such as hospital-based services, emergency services, or obstetrical services. Meanwhile, the health care team, including nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, Physiotherapists, family doctors, and others are not structured or trained to fill in the gaps and collaborate in order to meet the needs of patients -- or even to attempt to meet these needs. The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador has taken steps to improve in this area and have committed themselves to providing seamless service for clients. One of the first steps thy have taken in this area has included training and the development of legislation for nurse practitioners. The rest of the country still has to follow their route. (Commission on the Future of Healthcare in Canada).

This disconnectedness between primary care services and between collaboration of doctors is seen in almost any medical institution anywhere in the country and was documented last year by Simpson in his post on the greatest problem facing the Canadian medical system. Simpson described a typical day of service and noted that one day Dr. Jeffrey Turnbull, a physician at the Ottawa Hospital, had serviced:

1022 patients in the hospital's two main campuses, the Civic and the General, and 135 ALCs. Thirteen percent of the beds [were] occupied by people who, under ideal circumstances, should not be in the hospital.(Simpson, 2012)

Many of the patients should not have come into acute care. Some were completely healthy. But patients' records had been misread or miscommunicated, or not read at all.

The Ottawa Hospital that Turnbull serviced -- and many others - has brilliant medicine, caring staff and doctors; some of the most advanced technology, huge medical talent, and is the apex of medical health care. Nonetheless, it gets into routine problems and is wasting huge expense on needless tests and drugs as well as beds that could have been allocated to others (for instance) on a day by day routine. All because of disjointed communication and unwieldy bureaucracy.