Regina Leader-Post

Physician makes case for fixing Canadian health care system

Doctor to deliver lecture at U of R on pharmacare, more community solutions

- PAMELA COWAN pcowan@postmedia.com

Dr. Danielle Martin gained prominence for vigorously defending Canada’s health care system before a partisan United States Senate committee, but she’s not blind to our health care system’s shortcomin­gs.

The outspoken Toronto doctor will speak in Regina on Thursday about the need to improve our health care.

“In Canada we often have conversati­ons that are quite binary about health care — either it’s perfect and there’s nothing that needs to be done to improve it or it’s terrible and it needs to be completely thrown out,” Martin said in a phone interview. “Neither are true.”

Martin attracted public and media attention when she testified before a 2014 Senate subcommitt­ee examining the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obama Care. Despite fielding tough questions from Republican Senator Richard Burr, she kept calm and cool.

A segment of the testimony, posted by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, has received more than 1.5 million YouTube hits.

Martin notes Canada’s strong health care system is based on fairness and need, not the ability to pay.

“Those are critically important values, but that doesn’t mean the system is perfect,” Martin said. “Everyone who interacts with their health care system knows there are ways that it needs to be made better. As a family doc working in the system, I see examples of that every day with my own patients.”

Martin is vice-president of Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions at Women’s College Hospital (WCH) and a family physician in the Family Practice Health Centre at WCH. Trained as a family physician, she is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto.

She is scheduled to speak at the University of Regina’s Centre on Aging and Health’s annual distinguis­hed lecture, to be held at 6 p.m. Thursday in Room 110 of the Classroom Building.

Her talk about improving health care for seniors is based on her book Better Now: Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care For All Canadians. The lecture is free and open to the public.

“My talk will focus on doing more with less,” Martin said. “How can we meet the needs of an aging population without spending a whole lot more money in the health care system.”

She maintains care focuses too much on hospitals and doctors.

“That’s not necessaril­y what we need, given a population that is aging,” Martin said. “We need to be looking to more communityb­ased models of care, something that Tommy Douglas spoke about (at) the very onset of medicare in the early ’60s.”

That requires a shift toward wellness, prevention and keeping people as healthy and as close to home as possible.

“It’s very expensive to be admitting, readmittin­g and readmittin­g people to the hospital for chronic diseases that can be managed in the community,” Martin said.

As people live longer, they’ll likely experience chronic illnesses.

“We need mechanisms to support people in managing those chronic illnesses through their family physicians and in the home rather than have all roads lead to the emergency department and all roads leading to the in-patient bed,” Martin said. “That’s a terrible quality of life, as any senior will tell you who has experience­d the revolving door of hospital admissions, and it’s also incredibly expensive.”

She’s passionate about promoting universal pharmacare in Canada.

“Canada is now officially the only country in the industrial­ized world that has universal health care that doesn’t include prescripti­on medication­s,” Martin said. “Pharmacare truly is the unfinished business of medicare.”

She’ll ask audience members to join people across Canada who are pushing federal decision-makers to make pharmacare a reality.

“It’s going to be very difficult for provinces to go it alone,” Martin said. “We know that one in five Canadian households reports that someone in that household is not taking their medicine as prescribed because of concerns about cost and that number is only going to rise.”

She notes stable employment with a health benefits plan provided by employers is dropping.

“More and more people are working contracts, and more and more people are working parttime and at multiple jobs,” she said. “Those people are not getting drug coverage through their employers. It’s not just low-income people and it’s not just seniors.”

She worries that if models of care aren’t redesigned to provide more community options, seniors won’t live fulfilled lives.

“It’s going to lead to more people having longer lives that are of poor quality,” Martin said. “I worry less about the cost because I think it tends to get overblown, but I worry about the impact on people.

“We should be trying to figure out how to make the last decades of life really dignified and as healthy as possible for people and that’s not where our focus is right now.”

 ??  ?? Dr. Danielle Martin
Dr. Danielle Martin

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