Canada's Crumbling Medicare System

[styky]

87 infants potentially exposed to TB at Toronto-area hospital

CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Saturday, Aug. 4, 2012 2:08PM EDT
Last Updated Saturday, Aug. 4, 2012 7:37PM EDT

A Toronto-area hospital is testing 87 infants for potential exposure to tuberculosis after a staff member tested positive for the infectious disease.

The Scarborough Hospital warned late last week that dozens of babies who were in its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit between April 1 and July 18 may have been exposed to the disease.

The hospital has called the tests a “precaution,” saying the risk of transmission is low.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/87-infants ... z22hv9lmKL

[styky]

from an article at the star

Her symptoms were so minimal she was allowed to continue work in the NICU, Azzopardi said.

A secondary test that took about four weeks to process confirmed the TB infection on July 18. The nurse immediately stopped work, to be treated.

Would you take your baby back to a hospital that did not stop this nurse from working immediately after the first test.

[styky]

Kelly McParland: Alberta expenses uproar shows how governments vaporize health budgets

Kelly McParland | Aug 3, 2012 12:56 PM ET

There’s something more than just a little weird about the tale of Allaudin Merali, who was executive vice president and chief financial officer with Alberta Health Services until this week, when he left amid an expenses uproar.

Mr. Merali departed after it came to light he’d run up $346,208 in expenses during a previous stint in the province, when he served as chief financial officer for Capital Health, a precursor of AHS. The CBC revealed that between January 2005 and August 2008, Merali billed for everything from lavish dining (which seems to be standard fare in these expense account boondoggles) to repairs for his Mercedes, $2,300 to have a car phone installed, $900 at a wine store, $1,800 at a golf club, plus mileage, gas, insurance, car repairs, even car washes and snacks.

In 2008, Alberta consolidated its health boards into the centralized AHS, purportedly to cut costs. Merali was given a $1 million payout and generous retirement packages and moved on to Ontario, where he was hired as a consultant for eHealth Ontario, the much-troubled effort by Ontario’s government to computerize patient health records. In 2009 he was among consultants criticized for the lavish deals they’d been accorded: Merali reportedly earned $2,750 a day, plus a $75 per diem. His apartment was paid for, the province paid $21,000 for 31 flights home to Edmonton over five months, yet media reports indicated he also expensed tea, muffins and minor parking fees.

This year Merali returned to Alberta, where he was hired as chief financial officer at AHS. This reunited him with Sheila Weatherill, who had been his boss at Capital Health, and who received $1.5 million after the consolidation in 2008. He was accorded a base salary of $425,000 base salary. His departure Wednesday came just hours before the CBC was to reveal its findings. Weatherill, who had approved Merali’s expenses at Capital health, quit the AHS board the next day.............http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... h-budgets/

[styky]

Editorial: medical insurance needs rethink

Offering users a ‘free’ service virtually guarantees that the health system will be overused

By Kieran Bridge, Special to the Sun August 6, 2012
A recent guest editorial (We tinker with the Canada Health Act at our peril, July 24) relies on ill-founded arguments in suggesting that the nearly 30-year-old Canada Health Act should remain unchanged.

Perhaps the most troublesome and outdated aspect of the act is the fiscal punishment it allows the federal government to mete out if patients contribute to the cost of their own medical care. In order to comply with the Canada Health Act, the B.C. Medical Services Plan (MSP) prohibits such payments for some (not all) medical care. MSP does so because otherwise the federal government can claw back its fiscal transfers to B.C. under the Canada Health Act, to punish the province if patients pay directly (instead of indirectly, through their taxes) even a small part of the cost of their own care.

In other insurance contexts, such payments are known as deductibles or copayments. Such direct payments are soundly based in both economic analysis and common sense. Allowing the users of any service to believe that it is “free” is a virtual guarantee that the service will be overused, and will be used needlessly by some. The statement in the guest editorial that “there is no evidence at all that user fees reduce the unnecessary uses of health services” implies that medical insurance is somehow exempt from the economic realities that apply to other types of insurance, and to virtually all other goods and services that are offered “free” to the user.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Edit ... z22utrHiQc

[styky]

Saskatchewan to pay for expensive treatment for little girl with rare disease

By: The Canadian Press

Posted: 8:42 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

REGINA - The Saskatchewan government has agreed to pay for treatment for a three-year-old girl with a rare disease.

Violet Revet of Langenburg is one of only nine people in Canada who has Mucopolysaccharidosis VI.

The disease has no cure and the longer she goes without treatment, the shorter her life span will be.

Andrew McFayden's son, Isaac, was diagnosed with the disease in 2005.

McFayden, of Campbellford, Ont., was told Isaac would only have seven or eight years to live.

That was before doctors realized a treatment was making the rounds in the United Kingdom and the United States — a synthetic enzyme known as naglazyme that acts as a replacement in the body.

Isaac could get access to it under a special access program but the drug wasn't covered in Ontario.

It took McFayden eight months of lobbying before the provincial government agreed to pay for it at a cost of about half a million dollars a year.

"It's a very devastating condition," said McFadyen, whose eight-year-old son goes to Toronto for regular treatments.

"Essentially, kids that are diagnosed with (it) lack an enzyme in their blood that breaks down all the complex sugars. Because those complex sugars that occur naturally in the body don't break down they need to find a place to go and so they end up being stored in the bones, tissues, organs, and muscles and it leads to many progressive symptoms: heart and airway disease, progressive stiffening of the joints, corneal clouding, spinal cord compression."...................http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada ... 23996.html

[Charles J. White]

A friend of mine just had a baby in South Carolina, it cost them $10,000. They had to pay approx $6,000 to 7,000 before hand, and approx $3,000 after leaving the hospital. I don't know the exact breakdown. Canadians prefer the socialist model over the one in America. Canada's healthcare system will be the last part of the welfare state to be eliminated

[Snoot Gangpitch]

Ask the Doctor: Doors are closing on pain sufferers

December 20, 2011 - Readers of my column will know that I have been addressing a great number of topics concerning chronic pain for over two years now. Sometimes, I reported on a number of painful syndromes or discussed their scientific basis. I also wrote about my patients and shared of their stories with you, some cases were heart breaking and others full of hope, courage and achievement. I have also written systemic issues such as the impact chronic pain has on Canadians and its emotional toll, the financial cost to society and the desperate need for a comprehensive pain strategy. I’ve addressed the lack of awareness, knowledge and political will to deal with an immense problem that is only increasing in scope as the population ages.

The stories that I will share with you today will further demonstrate how our administrators and lawmakers lack vision and how as a result, chronic pain sufferers are re-victimized. Since I live and practice in Ontario, I know of stories affecting patients in that province but I am fairly confident that they reflect the reality in other provinces as well. Particularly those that lack comprehensive pain management strategy.

Several years ago, my own hospital closed down a small chronic pain program that offered cognitive behavioural management (which is truly needed for chronic pain patients). The savings to the hospital budget? Meagre. The loss? Immense in terms of my ability to get much needed help for my patients. A year and a half ago, the pain clinic at St. Joseph’s hospital in Toronto as well as the Kingston Pain clinic closed for similar reasons with similar impact. The latest victim is the Sunnybrook Pain Clinic that has been helping sufferers for 25 years. It currently serves over 3,000 patients and it is slated for closure next spring in 2012.

What provisions, you might ask, have been made for its patients? None. The remaining hospital based pain clinics are overloaded, barely function and some of the existing ones are already in danger of closing or losing members of their staff. Patients from the Sunnybrook pain clinic are desperately knocking at ACTION’s door to make the public aware of these closures. Meanwhile, administrators, lawmakers and politicians have made every effort to keep it off the public’s radar.

As we make headway in Ontario towards the creation of comprehensive pain management, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (the national body that certifies the physicians who have obtained specialty training) is working to establish the sub-specialty of pain management. This will require an additional 2 years of training in qualified institutions and special exams and certification thereafter before a physician can say he/she is certified in Pain Medicine. The irony is that these specialty-training positions are supposed to start in 2014 across the country. This begets the following question: where are the doctors going to be trained if hospital programs are closing down? Every time a clinic closes down, its members go to other clinics to work (which becomes harder and harder) or stop practicing pain management altogether. Valuable and irreplaceable resources are lost and it will be very difficult to rebuild a clinic once it is lost.

Here is another example that illustrates how bad things have gotten in Ontario (one of the many I can recite since I know the system inside out). The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, has a wonderful, well organized, multidisciplinary pain clinic for kids. However, when they reach the age of 18, they are considered adults and not eligible for care. By the time they become young adults with painful conditions and disabilities, are left to fend for themselves, seeking pain management, without any proper planning and longitudinal care for transition to adult pain clinics.

Two months ago I saw a young man who had just turned 18. Three years before, at the age of 15, he had had a serious car accident and had broken several bones in his leg, had many surgeries and had to deal with serious and chronic infections of the wounds. His dream had been to play professional football. Before the accident he had achieved a very high status at a level which was close to becoming professional.

One would expect that this was a career ending injury, but my young patient did not think so. Against ALL odds he has returned to training 3 hours a day for a year now, has applied to several universities and hopes he will be accepted and given an athletic scholarship. This young man (whose deformed leg made me cringe) came to see me for one very simple reason. His family physician after his discharge from the Sick Kids’ pain clinic, adamantly refused to prescribe for him a strong opioid that had sustained this young man through the past year of his grueling training. The irony? The dose of the drug was “imperceptible”, so small that it was good for babies, but was enough to keep this strong-willed young man in pursuit of his dream.

All the stories I shared with you here, are examples of a disjointed and broken system of care for those suffering from chronic pain. This is why I, my colleagues, my patients, ACTION (the not for profit organization I chair in Ontario), and national bodies such as the Canadian Pain Society, work together to push for a better system, a system that must provide comprehensive care for all those who suffer from chronic pain. If you suffer from unrelenting chronic pain or you have a love one who suffers, please join any of these bodies and talk to your physicians, your MPs and MPPs. The more our voices are heard, the more chance we have to make policy makers understand the problem of chronic pain.

Angela Mailis Gagnon, MD, MSc, FRCPC(PhysMed)

Director, Comprehensive Pain Program,

Senior Investigator, Krembil Neuroscience Centre

Toronto Western Hospital,

Chair ACTION Ontario www.actionontario.ca

www.drangelamailis.com

[styky]

Matt Gurney: Ontario’s healthcare system dithers while babies die

Matt Gurney | Sep 4, 2012 10:11 AM ET | Last Updated: Sep 4, 2012 10:16 AM ET
There was an absolutely astonishing article over the weekend on the development of a new Ontario breast milk bank. The facility, to operate out of a Toronto hospital, will house properly screened donations of human breast milk for babies whose own mothers are, for whatever reason, unable to nurse their children. A facility such as this will keep babies alive and save taxpayers money. Yet it has been stuck in limbo for no less than six years.

The medical advantages of breast milk, relative to infant formula, are acknowledged by healthcare professionals. But in some instances, particularly where the infant is premature, breast milk may be about more than just better testing outcomes later in life. It can mean the difference between life and death. Experts estimate at least 15 babies a year will be saved in Ontario by the breast milk bank, as it will help prevent a dangerous infection against which formula is of no help.....................http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... abies-die/

[styky]

Mother wants donated breast milk from Toronto bank
Provincial milk bank to provide donated breast milk to ill newborn babies at Ontario hospitals
CBC News
Posted: Sep 5, 2012 12:38 PM ET
Last Updated: Sep 5, 2012 1:21 PM ET

Some parents want a new provincial breast milk bank to do more than provide donated breast milk to unhealthy babies, as it has proposed.

The brand new provincial milk bank is set to open in January at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital in partnership with the Hospital for Sick Children and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

It will accept donated breast milk, pasteurize it and provide the milk to newborn babies in hospitals across Ontario who are born with a very low birth weight or if they have a serious bowel disorder.....................http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/st ... -bank.html

[Fairwarning]

My mother finally will see an urologist this Friday after waiting for an entire year.

[styky]

My mother finally will see an urologist this Friday after waiting for an entire year.

I'll say a prayer for her that's it's not cancer

[Fairwarning]

My mother finally will see an urologist this Friday after waiting for an entire year.

I'll say a prayer for her that's it's not cancer

Thank you.

Might I add that I mentioned her having to wait for a year a couple of weeks ago or so on FD. Her appointment was cancelled due to the doctor having some personal issue(family emergency or whatever..) that week but she will finally now see the doc this Friday. Don't want anyone thinking I am liar or something...

A year is insane for anyone having to wait to see a specialist. Lord help us all.

[styky]

My mother finally will see an urologist this Friday after waiting for an entire year.

I'll say a prayer for her that's it's not cancer

Thank you.

Might I add that I mentioned her having to wait for a year a couple of weeks ago or so on FD. Her appointment was cancelled due to the doctor having some personal issue(family emergency or whatever..) that week but she will finally now see the doc this Friday. Don't want anyone thinking I am liar or something...

A year is insane for anyone having to wait to see a specialist. Lord help us all.

I was reading a story recently about a women in Manitoba who has been diagnosed with cancer and given about 3 months. She also needs joint surgery so she can walk without pain. They scheduled her surgery to take place in about 2 years time. Her doctor is banging his head against the wall pulling his hair out because those who set this stuff up gave him a finger wag when he suggested she be pushed to the head of the line out of compassion.

[Fairwarning]

Styky, my father had 2 severe artery blockages around his heart in 2007. He was living in Ontario at the time and the Ottawa Heart Institute admitted him within days, fixed him up etc...He told me he thought he was treated very well by them. Some heart probs do run in his side of the family. He was lucky, he couldn't even shovel 4-5 shovel fulls of snow without running out of breath and feeling like he was going to pass out. Luckily docs detected his prob fairly quickly.

Anyways, my parents have since moved to NS. My father does get 'sensations' in his chest, burnings, things just don't feel right at times. Every time he has brought up this to his doc in NS, the doc just won't agree to have him re-checked sent to a specialist in NS. Sort of like "nah, you're fine....."

Ottawa Heart Institute even told him themselves back in 2007 that he should keep a regular checkup....no duh, he had 2 severe blockages and those kind of probs run in his family.

My fathers blockages were not discovered by EKG or a stress test. It was only an MRI that found those probs back in ON and my father tells that to his doc and it seems he don't care anyway.

I assume getting an MRI in NS is like asking can I win the lotto please?

[styky]

Styky, my father had 2 severe artery blockages around his heart in 2007. He was living in Ontario at the time and the Ottawa Heart Institute admitted him within days, fixed him up etc...He told me he thought he was treated very well by them. Some heart probs do run in his side of the family. He was lucky, he couldn't even shovel 4-5 shovel fulls of snow without running out of breath and feeling like he was going to pass out. Luckily docs detected his prob fairly quickly.

Anyways, my parents have since moved to NS. My father does get 'sensations' in his chest, burnings, things just don't feel right at times. Every time he has brought up this to his doc in NS, the doc just won't agree to have him re-checked sent to a specialist in NS. Sort of like "nah, you're fine....."

Ottawa Heart Institute even told him themselves back in 2007 that he should keep a regular checkup....no duh, he had 2 severe blockages and those kind of probs run in his family.

My fathers blockages were not discovered by EKG or a stress test. It was only an MRI that found those probs back in ON and my father tells that to his doc and it seems he don't care anyway.

I assume getting an MRI in NS is like asking can I win the lotto please?

If I were him I'd relay that at the ER of his closest hospital the next time he had symptoms and refuse to leave until they put in an effort to fix it. I go for an MRI every few months to monitor whether my drugs are still doing what their supposed to. The waiting room is rarely busy and I hear complaints of many missed appointments by patients who just fail to show up. I wonder how many of them died before their date?