The federal government has recently announced that it will to continue to increase healthcare transfers to the provinces at a rate of 6% until 2016-7. After that funding will be tied to economic performance.
It has opted to withdraw from the policy debate around health, leaving the provinces to tackle the growing problems in the area on their own.
Is this the right approach?
Thursday May 10, 2012 at 5.30PM. Château Laurier Hotel, Ottawa.
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Securing our Health System for the Future section
In his contribution to the Canada 2020 report, Dr. Philippe Couillard recommends that health care in Canada become more cost-effective. According to numbers from an OECD report drawing on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, health care spending in Canada in 2009 (as a percent of GDP) was the 6th highest of OECD countries, spending less than the US and France but more than the United Kingdom and Australia (http://www.oecd.org/document/38/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_48289894_1_1_1_1,00.html). However, despite the high expenditures, Canada has variable health care system performance and outcomes compared to other OECD countries (http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/products/learning_from_thebest_en.pdf ).
Getting better value for health care dollars spent requires a solid understanding of health care system performance and health outcomes, and more specifically, how the two are linked. Current performance measures in Canada tend to focus on health processes and outputs (think: wait times, volumes of procedures) that aren’t direct measures of patient outcomes. Furthermore, measures of the efficiency of health care spending are less than ideal. Future work in performance measurement should concentrate on determining the true effectiveness of our health care system and developing better measures for health care spending.
Thanks, Susan, for these thoughts. This is a very important area for the future. We look forward to hearing about the work you are doing on performance measurement.