Three national health groups eyed for closure

OTTAWA — A new report is recommending a dramatic overhaul to the role the federal government and its arms-length organizations play in the Canadian health-care system.

An external review released Tuesday found what it calls serious gaps and overlaps in the eight federally funded health organizations tasked with providing consistency and direction across Canada’s health-care system — a shortfall that it says is impossible to fix without retooling. Ottawa created eight pan-Canadian health organizations over the past three decades as self-governing, not-for-profit entities or as tools of federal health-care policy, including the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health.

“If the (pan-Canadian health organization) suite is to become a more effective lever for a re-engaged federal government, more than mere tinkering or housekeeping changes are required,” the report reads.

In particular, changes will be necessary to accommodate the federal government’s plan to develop a national pharmacare program, as well as to take advantage of big data to improve health delivery and outcomes, said report co-author Dr. Danielle Martin. The report offers four different scenarios which are meant as a “menu,” from which the government can balance its priorities and vision for the future of health care to choose either one or a mix of the solutions. But the report stresses that, while it’s not an audit of any specific organization, the overall architecture is inadequate.

Co-author Pierre-Gerlier Forest said one of the system’s failings is how the organizations are funded. “They compete for attention and they compete for money instead of working together in the same direction,” he said.

Some of the scenarios suggest three of the eight organizations be phased out — The Mental Health Commission of Canada, the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer and the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction — in order to move their expertise and resources elsewhere.

“It is not because we believe that these problems or issues have been dealt with and are finished that we make this recommendation,” said Martin. “It is because they are such critical areas where action is needed that we think that we need to ensure that the organizations and structures that support these issues need to be of the appropriate scale and with the appropriate missions and mandates to be successful.”