Will premier’s special council improve health care?
On Thursday, the Premier’s Council on Improving Healthcare and Ending Hallway Medicine delivered its initial thesis on health-care reform. The highly anticipated report identifies a number of key areas that have created strain in a system that is struggling to keep up with growing patient demands.
Dr. Rueben Devlin, who chairs the council and has had extensive experience in health care as a community-based orthopedic surgeon and hospital executive, has assembled an impressive team to tackle the challenging and unenviable task of improving access to care in Ontario. This group includes a healthy mixture of physicians, nurses, public-health experts and patient advocates.
One of the foundational aspects of this report is having the patient experience be a central focus for any of the reform measures to be implemented. This is an important recognition of the importance of patient-centred care that will become increasingly more personalized in the years ahead. The council also mentions supporting social determinants of health in a signal that it values how a patient’s socioeconomic, cultural and geographic background impacts health.
Additionally, the council has identified a crucial area that is often overlooked during discussions surrounding health-care reform. The rise in caregiver burden will affect the success of any healthcare system as it attempts to better integrate hospital and community-based services. What’s more is that women, who do the majority of caregiving, are at a disproportionately higher risk of burnout.
It is why the desire to better integrate services across the healthcare continuum is an important goal for the future of Ontario. The adoption of technology, as highlighted by the council, will be an important tool to achieve progress. This will be created through leveraging the potential of virtual care, creating a framework for interoperability and accessibility of electronic medical records and the integration of allied health-care providers in the community.
Ontario’s projected aging and growing population over the next several decades is an indication that a fundamental shift in the delivery of care must take place sooner rather than later. This is an im- mense challenge that requires buy-in from all the stakeholders. Without properly engaging these different partners, Ontario will continue struggling with hallway medicine, long wait-times and failed projects.
The Premier’s Council has an enormous challenge ahead. It has outlined an ambitious plan for health-care reform that will take years, if not decades, to come to fruition. Its initial report is light on specific details, despite identifying themes that are generally universally agreed upon. The hard part will be executing these ideas in a time when reigning in debt is seen as a priority.