Yesterday’s blog post has been edited and today is an op ed in the Toronto Star — How one Ontario community avoided chaos at H1N1 clinics. It is always a delight for me to highlight best practices in Canada’s health system and Sault Ste. Marie is full of them. See more about the Group Health Association health centre on pages 101-105 of Prescription for Excellence.
I did interviews with nine CBC morning shows today on the troubled roll out of the H1N1 vaccine. Canadians are rightfully enraged at the chaos of last week’s H1N1 vaccine clinics. There must be a better way to run a vaccine program. There are two main reasons why the vaccine roll out looks like rush hour at a Mexican bus terminal.
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After being home for a week from my trip to Alberta speaking on behalf of Friends of Medicare, I have a few reflections:
Activity-based funding
Alberta is moving to pursue a policy named “activity-based funding”. Essentially ABF is fee for service payment for hospital care. Hospitals would be paid a specific free for an episode of care such as a hip replacement. The United States government moved most of its hospital funding through their Medicare program into Diagnosis Related Groups or DRGs in 1983.
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I had an op- ed in the Toronto Star on Friday, “Can this Minister fix the health file? Job 1 for Deb Matthews is to help the Ontario Government regain its health policy focus. Good luck with that”. The final part of the subtitle was a little unfortunate because it sounds so negative and I am a very upbeat kind of guy. Newspaper readers need to remember that its an editor (usually a fairly lowly one) who choses the headlines. Writers have only a little influence and don’t get to proof the final version.
The op ed has a particular focus and didn’t talk a lot about the medicare issues. The Ontario McGuinty government has certainly done much better on medicare issues than Alberta. But, the use of Public Private Partnerships to build hospitals is continuing problem. And the competitive bidding process for homecare started by the Harris government continues to be a travesty.
I got back Saturday (the 17th) after a fun week in Alberta. I spoke to a number of events organized by Alberta Friends of Medicare. There were over 500 people who attended a raucous public meeting at the Polish Hall in Edmonton on Tuesday night. See the coverage in the Edmonton Journal. Kudos to Dave Eggen Friends of Medicare coordinator, Della Drury his campaign worker, economist Diana Gibson, research director at the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute who also spoke, and dozens of other folks who helped organize the meeting.
On Wednesday morning Dave Eggen and I flew to Calgary but our plane to Medicine Hat was cancelled because of snow so we rented a car and started our southern Alberta road trip. We had a wonderful crowd of 150 that night. Thanks so much to Jan Bunney chair of the Medicine Hat Chapter of Friends. It’s an amazing group of folks. Amongst other things they participate in Medicare Mondays where they go to places like Tim Horton’s and talk to people about health care in their community. Here’s a picture of Dave Eggen, Jan Bunney, and me.
Then it was on to Lethbridge where Michael Cormican and his chapter organized a terrific meeting Thursday night at Southminster Church.
We drove to Calgary on Friday morning where I talked to a meeting of the Health Sciences Association of Alberta.
I will be writing up my analysis of my Alberta trip in the next few days but you can read the op ed I wrote before the trip here. It is quite frightening how quickly Alberta seems to be eroding the public system.
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