Health-care roulette
Health care, as with retirement planning, is a can easily kicked down the road – each are procrastinated until imminently required.
Health is taken for granted, but when services of a strained system are required, we become evangelical advocates; fading with health recovery. Demography is a predictable science. There is a silent recognition of aging, but we deny this mortal certainty. The general population is aging – the consequence of baby booming and low fertility rates. Reflective of the population, our health care providers follow our same path.
As the acuity of our needs increases, so too does the complexity of our care. Demands on frontline workers is now disconnected from compensation and life balance resulting in a predictable imbalance of available service and unprecedented strain on the professional providers and the health care ecosystem we rely on.
Our health management is represented by many professionals, cogs critical to care delivery and management. One representative of our care are nurses. There are approximately 431,769 regulated nurses in Canada and in P.E.I. about 2,420. Professional nurses are expanding at about one per cent per year. Unfortunately, we are aging at a greater rate.
P.E.I.’s population of 65 year olds (plus) has increased 43 per cent in the last decade, and those 65 (plus) will double by 2057. Overall demand for nursing of seniors is projected to increase from just under 64,000 full-year jobs to 142,000 full-year jobs by 2035 across Canada, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
There should be no question where society is heading on our health care journey. We are aging, and we require more services. We are expensive and those that care for us are suffering our same maturing fate.
Encouragingly, UPEI educates 54 RNs per year, Holland College educates 50 LPNs and 28 RCWs. But the demand for resources is not unique to P.E.I. and not all our educated professionals remain in our province. Nursing enrolment is increasing at about one per cent per year, but demand is growing at 3.4 per cent annually. Supports are needed – foreign recruitment is one part of the solution.
Nursing is a visible measure of our care, but there are pharmacists, paramedics, physicians and medical specialists in our health care continuum – over 4,000 professionals providing Islanders with care. Nursing, like all other allied health professionals, are increasingly challenging to identify and recruit. Currently over 1.4 million Canadian seniors need and receive paid and unpaid continuing care supports.
This figure will increase by 71 per cent in 2026 (Conference Board of Canada).
Health care is our province's single largest continuous investment, devouring $750 million in our most recent budget, or 34 per cent of our total expenditures. Based on forecasts, growth is insatiable.
Health is a large function of our economy, a large consumer of our taxes and an identified to expand in cost and complexity. Overlaid with a workforce poised to exit and challenges to recruit in a competitive environment, costs are assured to increase.
We can expect government to be compelled to move in two directions: aggressively grow the economy to accommodate financial collisions and seek innovative methods of recruitment and efficient care delivery, including mechanization and more individual self-reliance. Nursing is a canary of the coal mine as all health management becomes more challenging.