As premiers met in Niagara on the Lake, Ont. for their annual Council of the Federation summit, the Health Action Lobby, Canadian Medical Association and Canadian Nurses Association called on premiers to base health policies on the work of the Health Care Innovation Working Group -- a national network of medical researchers and policy experts funded and staffed by the provinces.
The three organizations met with premiers just before the politicians began closed-door meetings. Provincial leaders are scheduled to discuss health-care issues Friday, July 26. Trying to get the provinces to stay the course with the Health Care Innovation Working Group is just one way of meeting the challenge of disappearing federal funding and involvement in health care, said Catholic Health Alliance of Canada executive director Jim Roche.
The CHAC is pressuring the premiers as part of HEAL, the Health Action Lobby.
The Catholic alliance brings together 12 Catholic sponsor organizations which run about 100 hospitals, nursing homes and similar institutions nationally.
“The concern of the national organizations that comprise the membership of HEAL has, since its founding, been a concern over erosion of federal leadership in relation to the health care system,” Roche wrote in an email to The Catholic Register. “Which undermines the ability to preserve the foundational values expressed in the Canada Health Act.”
Getting the provinces on board with a national system of best practices, which the Health Care Innovation Working Group is developing, can help stop the erosion of national standards, according to Roche.
“The Catholic Health Alliance and Catholic health care more generally has a long history of national advocacy in relation to the health-care system,” Roche said.
Roche regards the lobbying effort as an extension of efforts his organization made to influence the 2007 National Forum on Health and the 2002 Romanow Commission.
The push in favour of the Health Care Innovation Working Group puts the Catholic hospitals on side with about 2,000 union-backed protesters who showed up in Niagara on the Lake Thursday to demand increased funding for health care.
There’s no magic bullet that will fix health care, not even more money, said HEAL co-chair and CEO of the Canadian Psychological Association Dr. Karen Cohen.
“If it was a quick fix and it was easy to do it would be done by now,” Cohen said. “It is complicated.”
Keeping all the provinces fully committed to the Health Care Innovation Working Group is Canada’s best chance of spending health-care dollars on things hospitals and other institutions have tried and know really will work.
The Health Care Innovation Working Group was set up by Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall in 2012. It consists of policy experts from the provincial ministries of health along with researchers and executives from hospitals and other institutions.
Provinces are worried their health budgets are heading for a cliff. The federal government has guaranteed no-strings-attached six per cent annual increases in funding until the 2016-2017 fiscal year. From then on funding will be tied to economic growth.
Population growth and aging is not tied to economic growth and provinces have complained Ottawa plans to strand them with the problem.
The federal government has rejected the charges it is cutting health funding, has backed off national standards or is setting the Canada Health Act to one side.
“While respecting provincial and territorial jurisdiction, the Government of Canada also plays a key role in health-care innovation with more than $1 billion invested annually in health research, health human resources and e-health,” former federal Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq told the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal May 10.
The key to the future may lie in doing less of the same – finding new ways to meet health care demands, said Cohen.
“It may be making change a little bit at a time,” she said. “What’s critically important is that if we make change that it’s deployed, that there’s provincial uptake and that it’s implemented.” In some cases, spending more money now will save money in the long run, Cohen said.
“It’s very important to do things related to primary prevention, because the costs offset in the long run can be very significant,” she said. “So we’re not waiting until things get so bad that people end up in emerge getting the most costly care.”