Improved health data

For example, if we really want to know about health outcomes related to primary care, we first need to understand the various ways primary care is currently delivered – whether by solo fee-for-service doctors, or by teams, which include nurse practitioners as well as physicians who are remunerated by capitation, or some other model.

There is enough variety in primary care delivery across Canada that it should be possible to learn what works best by careful and probing comparisons across and within jurisdictions.

We then need to follow samples of individuals over time, to track which mode of primary care organization has patients with fewer illnesses, fewer hospitalizations and longer lives.

It is only with these kinds of longitudinal, person-level data that we’ll be able to produce evidence on which we can base valid indicators of health outcomes and connect them to jurisdictions’ current and evolving ways of providing primary care to their residents.

Will the provinces collaborate, agree on standardized definitions and, with federal financial support, make the investments needed so these critical data become available?

The federal government’s wording on this is ambiguous: “To access their share of the federal funding, including the guaranteed 5 per cent growth top-up payments to the CHT, for the next five years, provincial and territorial governments are asked to commit to improve how health information is collected, shared, used and reported to Canadians to promote greater transparency on results.”

Is this general statement merely cajoling, or is the federal government actually waving a serious fiscal stick? That will ultimately dictate the data outcome because past decades of federal initiatives have repeatedly shown that if Ottawa fails to wield meaningful fiscal penalties, the momentum on serious health care reform is bound to face disappointment. n H tion with a specialist is the most difficult type of medical care to access.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada and an adjunct professor in the faculties of medicine and law at the University of Ottawa. David Castle is professor of public administration at the University of Victoria. They both served on the Expert Advisory Group of the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy convened by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

• For patients, the ability to ask questions is the most important support or resource they need to manage their care, whereas caregivers reported financial support is the most important support or resource needed.

“While exhausted healthcare providers are busy doing their very best to get Canadians the life-saving treatments and screenings they need, the cancer care system remains strained, and that needs to change,” says Dr Stuart Edmonds, Executive Vice President of Mission, Research and Advocacy at the Canadian Cancer Society. “With approximately 1.5 million people in Canada currently living with or beyond cancer, we must do everything in our power to ensure the needs of people with cancer and their caregivers are a priority as decision makers address the challenges to our healthcare system.”

The Canadian Cancer Society is calling for everyone, everywhere to get involved in advocating to government to improve cancer care. The Get Better card-writing campaign invites people to use an online tool to create their own get better cards, not for their loved ones, but to send to elected officials. Through these cards, people can share their stories and the challenges they or a loved one faced when accessing cancer care in Canada, and CCS will print and deliver them to members of Parliament in the spring. The goal is to bring the lived experiences of people impacted by cancer to the forefront to help make cancer care better in all its forms: make early detection of cancer better, make backlogs and delays better, make drug access better, make palliative care better, and more. People can learn more and take action at cancer.ca/GetBetter. The need for improvements to the cancer system has never been more urgent. Based on data from the Canadian Cancer Registry, we know that disruptions to cancer care during the pandemic, including screening and diagnostics, have led to delayed cancer diagnoses and fewer cases diagnosed. In 2020, there were 6.1 per cent fewer new cancer cases compared to the annual average for 2015 to 2019, indicating a significant number of undetected cancer cases that will require treatment and care in the coming years, adding pressure to an already strained healthcare system. n H