Reflections

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Ijaz Rauf is President at Eminent Tech Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Physics, School of Graduate Studies at York University

 

Growing evidence of problems in the level of quality and safety of care across healthcare organizations, along with public awareness, has made the quality of health care the talk of town. This has drawn significant government and regulatory attention to healthcare systems across the country. Health Quality Ontario (HQO) was established with the mandate to monitor and report on healthcare performance in Ontario and the mission to bring about meaningful improvement in health care. Besides reporting on the key performance indicators, HQO holds quality rounds to share knowledge and best practices. Recently, I attended one of HQO’s quality rounds,  and I left with the impression that quality in health care is not considering the right measures, using the right experts or measuring the right data. ...continue reading →

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Praveen Ganty is a Consultant in Pain Medicine & Anesthesia in Toronto

 

There is a new fashion in the world of Medicine, and in the world of primary care in particular. It is the reluctance to continue prescribing, or to prescribe, opioids. There are two sides to the situation. As medical professionals, we have realized the potential harm that opioids can cause to potentially any patient, especially if prescribed for chronic non-cancer pain. However, many of us have also decided to stop prescribing opioids to patients who have been on them for many years, which raises some concerns.  The first principle in the practice of Medicine is Primum non nocere-first do no harm - (modified to ‘first do no further harm’ by some authors).

Managing chronic pain is not easy and - let’s face it - most of us don’t have enough training in this area. A 2011 survey revealed that only an average of 19.5 hours are devoted to the management of pain in an average medical school curriculum. ...continue reading →

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Charlie Tan is a medical student at McMaster University

Lawrence Loh is Associate Medical Officer of Health at Peel Public Health

 

Too often, physicians forget that they might be just one of many sources of health advice that patients access. Behind every physician-patient encounter is a difference in how health and wellness are perceived and pursued. For many physicians, their views and advice are shaped by formal education and training, the Hippocratic Oath, and the insights of colleagues, researchers, and experts. Their patients, by contrast, have a different and often wider range of influences, be it personal beliefs, social networks, or cultural traditions.

Over the last three decades, physician practice has been transformed by two important movements ...continue reading →

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Sarah Currie lives in Ottawa, Ontario

 

I changed jobs this week. On Monday, my first day, when I should have been primarily concerned with learning the office microwave-cleaning rota and orienting myself to a new Xerox print centre, I was a little preoccupied. At 8 pm on Sunday, I found out that my father had fallen, broken his hip, undergone emergency surgery, and was in isolation in a hospital in southwestern Ontario. Details were fuzzy. Hospital staff would not share much with my aunt, my father’s sister. He had managed to call her on Sunday morning, 24 hours after his fall, once he had come round after anaesthesia. He needed her to go to his house to make sure my mom was okay. My mom wasn’t answering the phone.

Unanswered phone calls are not uncommon at my parents’ house. My father is quite hard of hearing, after spending 37 years as an infantry officer. My mother tends not to answer the phone because she is self-conscious. She has a severe cognitive disability ...continue reading →

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Trevor Hancock is a professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s school of public health and social policy

 

The Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law is said to include the principle of making decisions taking into account impacts on the  seventh generation, which means thinking 140 – 175 years ahead. That is a far cry from our modern politicians, who can barely think past the next election, never mind our businesses and stock markets that are too often focused only on the next quarter’s bottom line.

As Canada celebrates its 150th anniversary, it seems a particularly good time to think about the next 150 years. Of course we can’t predict that far ahead; imagine how much of today’s world we could have predicted in 1867. But there is no doubt that what we do today will have impacts at least 150 years into the future, and probably much further. ...continue reading →

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Cory Peel is a GP-Anesthesiologist who locums throughout British Columbia, Alberta and the Yukon

 

A couple of months ago I read Mike Hager’s article in the Globe and Mail about Dr. Reggler’s tribulations at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Comox, BC, and I was overcome by a realization that, despite having been a practicing Family Physician for 7 years, I had culpably little understanding of the prejudicial impact of faith-based hospitals in determining patient access to care.

The article detailed the refusal of the “Catholic hospital” in Comox to provide medical aid in dying to its patients despite having a staff physician willing and able to do so, thereby forcing them to be transferred elsewhere. That such a policy could exist stunned me. It is the work of “the bishop [a.k.a. the Diocese of Victoria] and the hospital board,” with the board’s CEO maintaining that “minimizing patient discomfort and pain is always the highest priority,” which seems to me to fly in the face of logic.

It is not, however, an isolated example. Canada contains many hospitals whose delivery of healthcare to its patients is directed by Church doctrine. ...continue reading →

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Jesse Kancir is a resident in Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and former Policy Adviser to Canadian federal Minister of Health, Jane Philpott

 

Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States is a cause for worry for population and public health. An early policy victim appears to be Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA’s founding policy debates influenced my own interest in public health and health systems as a young medical student so the early steps taken by US Congress to dismantle it have affected me deeply. But it’s not just nostalgia. Concerns are real that Trump’s administration may impact global welfare, yet I’ve been comforted by thinking that a Trump administration highlights several opportunities for progress in Canadian healthcare. In 2017, Canadian healthcare can strive to contrast with negative developments in the US and be the highest expression of our commitment to each other and to a better society. ...continue reading →

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Pippa Hawley is the Head of the Division of Palliative Care at the University of British Columbia

 

The recent headlines about legalization of cannabis in Canada - a subject already fraught with bias - has illustrated the need for care when reporting on statistical observations. An example of things going badly wrong is a recent Vancouver Sun column headline “Fatal car crashes triple among drivers high on marijuana after legalization in Colorado; double in Washington state”. This was based on an article in the October issue of the BCMJ. The headline would seem to indicate that there has been a dramatic increase in fatal car crashes in those two states caused by people driving high on newly-legal cannabis.

This would be very important information and a pretty persuasive argument against legalization of cannabis, if it were true. ...continue reading →

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Li (Danny) Liang is a second year medical student at the University of Toronto with a BEng degree and a deep interest in the intersection of urban design and health

 

Growing up in Toronto's suburbs, I slowly began to realize what was wrong with how much of the city is designed. Most of the neighborhoods outside of the downtown core are clearly designed for cars, instead of pedestrians and cyclists. Most neighborhoods in the suburbs, composed of a sea single detached houses with small oases of high-rises sprinkled in, are not very walkable nor bike-friendly. Getting from point A to point B by walking becomes a huge odyssey: it often took at least half an hour to walk to the nearest library, movie theatre, grocery store or community centre. The way the city is designed is also unfair from a social justice perspective, as most of the people living in the Toronto Community Housing apartments I lived in could not afford to drive. The overall low population density of Toronto's suburbs means that there is not enough ridership to justify building rapid transit to the clusters of high-rises in the suburbs that are drowned by single-family detached houses. ...continue reading →

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TH - PHSPTrevor Hancock is a professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s school of public health and social policy

 

In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defence, mused about what we know and don’t know. He suggested there are the ‘known unknowns’ – for example, we know we don’t know how life began – and the ‘unknown unknowns’ – the things we don’t even know we are ignorant about.

But he forgot one important category – the ignored knowns; the things we know but prefer to ignore. This is what Al Gore called the inconvenient truth and is the realm of the science denial industry. With the election of Donald Trump, who seems to make a habit of ignoring science, evidence and fact, we are entering an era of what Stephen Colbert called ‘truthiness’ back in 2005: ...continue reading →