AIMS Welcomes Two New Members to its Award-Winning Health Care Policy Team
Building on its international reputation on health care reform
Payment is Powerful
Canada is facing difficulties recruiting medical graduates to practice family medicine, and the range of services offered by the current supply of general practitioners (GPs) is shrinking. Poor working conditions, a consequence of existing remuneration systems, are contributing to the dwindling supply of comprehensive primary care services, and the current system of remuneration creates inefficiencies in the delivery of primary health care. This paper explores various ways to improve primary care practice and increase GPs’ practice revenue without resorting to additional public funding.
AIMS visits prestigious Heritage Foundation in Washington to discuss Health Care
AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley's seminal talk - "The Top Ten Things People Believe About Canadian Health Care, But Shouldn't" continues to be a "best seller" with US audiences. On November 10, 2004 Crowley delivered this talk to an audience of informed and influential health stakeholders in Washington, DC at an event hosted by the presitgious Heritage Foundation.
How NOT to shorten the queues for needed surgery (NB)
If your top priority was to cut waiting times for vital surgery in our public health care system, the very last thing you would want to do would be to cut the number of operating theatres and their hours of operation, and put surgeons on salary so that the monetary rewards for a hard-working productive surgeon are prety much the same as those for a surgeon who prefers golf to appendectomies. So what have the managers of the Nova Scotia health care system done? They've cut the number of operating theatres and their hours of operation, and put surgeons on salary. How crazy is this? And before New Brunswickers and Prince Edward Islanders get too smug about this, they should recall that Halifax is an important regional centre offering surgical services to patients from these neighbouring provinces.
How NOT to shorten the queues for needed surgery (NS)
To consider the issue of how NOT to shorten queues for needed surgery from the NS persepctive, read this story.
How the Prime Minister squandered his fiscal legacy and got nothing in return
In his fortnightly column in the Halifax Herald and the Moncton Times Transcript, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley wrote about the first ministers' agreement on health. His conclusion? "In order to shore up his weak political position in a minority parliament, Paul Martin has largely sacrificed the fiscal maneuvering room he himself won for Ottawa in the early nineties. Yet he got no commitments for reform from the premiers, and only token nods in the direction of greater accountability for results. The Prime Minister has largely destroyed his chief legacy as finance minister and got nothing to show for it other than a year or two of peace on the health front. Like Neville Chamberlain before him, Paul Martin believes that there will be peace in our time. And like Chamberlain, he is likely to be bitterly disappointed."
AIMS Online, June 17, 2004
Urban Chic, Plugging Atlantica into the Emerging Global Network, Social Policy and the New Economy, David Zitner on Health Care Innovation and more.
AIMS Fellow David Zitner – Health Care Innovator
In April of this year, AIMS' Health Policy Fellow Dr. David Zitner of Dalhousie University wrote an opinion piece for the National Post outlining the benefits of health care co-operatives. In the article, Dr. Zitner says "Patient co-ops are a way to inject more money into the health care system without raising taxes; to improve the quality, speed, efficiency and convenience of contacts with medical professionals via technology; and to encourage more specialization among various levels of professionals like primary care nurses working under a physician's supervision. Patient power starts here." The patient co-op seems to be an idea whose time has come in Nova Scotia. A patient co-operative is being proposed by a Pictou County doctor. In this article from the Truro Daily news, Dr. Zitner and Diane Kelderman, CEO of the Nova Scotia Co-operative Council say "the concept of community run, medical co-operatives are the wave of the future."
AIMS Online May 13, 2004
Atlantica: Moncton’s New Neighbourhood in the Global Economy. AIMS addresses Greater Moncton Chamber’s AGM, Five Big Ideas: AIMS’ Roadmap for Atlantic Prosperity, Brian Lee Crowley's commentary in the National Post on Canada's first aboriginal-run MRI clinic and more.
First Nation Innovation – AIMS on native healthcare initiative
Canada's first aboriginal-run MRI clinic is scheduled to open on Muskeg Lake Cree Nation land, in east Saskatoon, in the spring of 2005. Clinics on reserves are not subject to provincial legislation, and First Nations are carefully examining the unique legal status this confers. This may create an opportunity for a tectonic policy shift in Canadian medicare as First Nations open a crack in the crust of the public sector healthcare monopoly. In this commentary for the National Post, AIMS president Brian Lee Crowley says we may be witnessing the birth of a parallel system that will not only provide superior healthcare choices to Canadians, but may indeed ensure the sustainability of the public system.