Via Medscape.com: Medical Associations Confront Canada's Healthcare Crisis. Excerpt:
The Canadian healthcare system has reached a breaking point and requires immediate and long-term changes to prevent a total collapse, according to new recommendations from three of the country’s top medical associations.
The Canadian Medical Association, Canadian Nurses Association, and College of Family Physicians of Canada developed an action plan to rebuild the healthcare workforce, reduce burnout, and retain healthcare workers who have felt strained for more than 2 years.
“We’ve really seen the challenges in the healthcare system brought much more to the forefront during the pandemic. It’s reaching a level of crisis that we’ve not seen before,” Katharine Smart, MD, president of the Canadian Medical Association, told Medscape Medical News.
“We’re hearing daily from people across the country about how bad things are,” she said. “From primary care to hospitals to specialists, everything is starting to implode.”
The organizations presented the policy recommendations to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Health and the federal/provincial/territorial Committee on Health Workforce in April. The action plan was published on the organizations’ websites on May 16.
Collaboration and Support
The Canadian healthcare system was struggling before the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors wrote. For more than 2 years now, healthcare workers have tried to keep the system from buckling under the strain.
Now healthcare workers are burning out and leaving the industry, which has pushed the system to a tipping point, they wrote. Healthcare professionals are facing massive patient backlogs and cannot provide the care that is needed.
“We’ve spent the last several months raising awareness of how dire things are,” Smart said. “Canadians have pride about our healthcare, but it idealizes our system and gets in the way of being realistic about what’s happening.”
The Canadian Medical Association, Canadian Nurses Association, and College of Family Physicians of Canada developed health human resources solutions to address the healthcare workforce in a “proactive and sustainable way,” she said. The plan offers immediate, medium, and long-term policy recommendations for the federal government to adopt and share with provinces and territories.
