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Patient advocacy has always existed, but experts say that the phenomenon has become more pronounced than ever

the issue has caught the attention of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. In a two-part series published last week, the CMAJ concluded that "patient navigators (are) becoming the norm in Canada."

Historically, hospital social workers have fulfilled the role. But friends and relatives of patients have often stepped in to help. During the 2004 C. difficile hospital epidemic in Montreal, some family members whose loved ones fell ill from the diarrhea-causing bacterium told The Gazette that they hired private cleaners to scrub patient rooms.

creation of an Office of the Seniors' Advocate in B.C.

The Office of the Seniors' Advocate was one of more than a dozen commitments announced by the health minister in February, just hours before B.C.Ombudsperson Kim Carter released a scathing report on seniors care in B.C.The report, the result of a three-year investigation, made 176 recommendations for improvements to home and community care, home support, assisted living and residential care.

The Seniors Health Care Support Line - which can be accessed at 1-877-952-3181 - was implemented last month for seniors and families who have experienced problems accessing health-care services

Canada Newswire Mon Sep 29 2014

TORONTO, Sept. 29, 2014 /CNW/ - As Ontario's new Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins sits down with provincial and territorial Health Ministers for their fall meeting this week, experts and patient advocates hope that he'll carry a strong message. Across Canada advocates are calling on the B.C. Health Minister to hang tough on the Medicare court challenge which threatens open season on patient user fees for surgeries, diagnostics and other procedures. The case was scheduled to begin on September 8, but lawyers for both Brian Day, owner of one of the largest private clinics in Canada, and the B.C. government asked the court for a delay in order to negotiate a settlement. Negotiations are now happening behind closed doors and the court date is delayed until March 2015.

Following a provincial audit in 2012 which revealed that Day was charging hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful user fees to patients, Day filed a Charter Challenge to nullify the laws that he was violating. His case aims to bring down the laws that protect single-tier Medicare and forbid clinics like his from extra-billing patients and charging user fees for care that currently must be provided without charge under the public health care system. The litigation has far-reaching implications for the entire country. Day's clinics were first exposed by patients who complained they were unlawfully billed for medical procedures. The B.C. government responded by trying to audit the clinics. Day refused to let in auditors until forced by a court order, and even then the clinics did not fully comply with auditors. Auditors had access to only a portion of the clinics' billings and only one month's worth of data. Nevertheless, what they found was astonishing. In a period of about 30 days, patients were subject to almost half a million dollars in user charges. The five patients who brought the initial legal petition have had their trial delayed while Day's Charter Challenge to the laws upholding single-tier Medicare is heard. They are still waiting for redress.

National Post Thu Aug 20 2015

Dozens of groups with their own political agendas could spend millions in this federal election campaign trying to influence voters. These "third parties" (they aren't political parties) are registered to advocate and run advertising during the federal election campaign. Their goals include: boosting funding for the CBC; improving seniors' care; restoring door-to-door mail delivery; securing better services for veterans; electoral reform in Canada; and strategic voting, to name a few. "The outcome of the election is going to come down to a handful of Conservative swing ridings, so we're trying to build blocks of voters to vote together to defeat the Conservatives," said Amara Possian, election campaign manager with Leadnow, an organization calling for action on climate change, democracy and the economy. The group's entire campaign is about channelling resources from what she says is a 450,000-person community across the country into ridings that can influence the outcome of the federal election.

There are 72 Conservative swing ridings where the group believes people who want change can, by voting together, determine whether a Tory candidate wins or loses. Leadnow has teams in a dozen ridings going door-to-door signing people up to vote: Fredericton, Kitchener Centre, London North Centre, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Eglinton-Lawrence, Willowdale, Elmwood-Transcona, Saskatoon-University, Calgary Centre, Edmonton Griesbach, Vancouver-Granville and Port Moody-Coquitlam. The Canada Elections Act regulates third parties that conduct election advertising. A third party "is considered a person or a group other than a candidate, registered party, or electoral district association of a registered party," according to Elections Canada. There are no rules on how much third parties can spend on advertising before the official start of an election campaign. Each third party can spend up to $439,410.81 on election advertising expenses during the 78-day campaign, and a maximum $8,788.22 in any one of the 338 electoral districts.

by Ryan O'Reilly, Mike Tierney, Andrew Remfry & Jeremy Petch

April 16, 2015

Maureen struggled with her condition for a number of years, until a friend of her daughter recommended she speak with Laurie Jenkins, a patient advocate from Healthcare Navigators Inc. After hearing Maureen’s story, Jenkins believed that she could help, and convinced Maureen to get a new MRI. Once that was completed, Jenkins spoke with Maureen’s family doctor about referring her to a surgeon who had expertise in similar cases.

News release March 19, 2014

The 43,000-member Hospital Employees’ Union welcomes Health Minister Terry Lake’s appointment of Isobel Mackenzie as B.C.’s seniors’ advocate. HEU secretary-business manager Bonnie Pearson says the new seniors’ advocate is much needed and hopes that government will provide the office with the necessary independence to do her job.

Canadian Press Mon Dec 21 2015

t was when Sarah was getting instructions on finding the unit at the New Brunswick hospital where she would undergo an abortion that she realized the lengths women from P.E.I. have to go to obtain the procedure. The young woman, who didn't want to use her real name, was on the phone for more than an hour as a nurse explained how to navigate the hospital's maze of hallways, and what would happen once she arrived.

She made the call discreetly, not wanting her boss to know she would take a day off to make the two-hour trip to the Moncton Hospital to end an unwanted pregnancy. Upset and nervous, the 26-year-old secretly lined up a drive with a friend and arranged to stay in a hotel in Moncton so she would be on time for her 6 a.m. appointment. "That's when it hit me what I was going through," she said in an interview.

May 24, 2016

Activists across the province want your vote for better health care. About 70 advocates, many holding labour group flags, rallied Tuesday on the grounds of Windsor Regional Hospital’s Metropolitan Campus calling for an end to health-care cuts. But instead of a one-off protest with signs reading Healthcare Cuts Have to Stop, this one had a twist: it promoted an unofficial provincewide referendum coming Saturday. The Ontario Health Coalition, supported locally by Making Waves Windsor Essex, will be at workplaces and high-profile locations such as malls and fast-food outlets asking people to vote in the Stop Hospital Cuts Now Referendum. The ballots will then be delivered to Queen’s Park.

Jul 14, 2016

Alberta’s new Seniors Advocate, Sheree Kwong See, will help bring the issues and concerns of seniors to government.

Kwong See has worked on behalf of seniors as an educator, researcher and policy expert for more than 25 years. She is a psychology professor at the University of Alberta and holds a PhD in experimental psychology with a specialization in aging. Kwong See is an expert on the physical, cognitive and social aspects of aging and has studied the impact of ageism as a factor in elder abuse. She was appointed Seniors Advocate after an open competition process and will serve until Dec. 31, 2019.

Advocates for a universal, national pharmacare program urged the House of Commons standing committee on health Monday to implement a program as soon as possible. The committee recently began studying the feasibility of implementing a universal pharmacare program in Canada.

April 18, 2016

UBC school of population and public health professor Steve Morgan, along with other signatories of Pharmacare 2020 — an academic group report that makes the case for expanding universal public health care system to include the cost of prescription medicines — argued that instituting a national pharmacare program could better leverage bulk purchasing power, lower drug prices in Canada and fill gaps in coverage. He was yet another witness who told MPs Canadians are paying too much for their drugs. “Canada spends 30 per cent to 50 per cent more on pharmaceuticals than 24 of the OECD countries, including many with comparable health care systems to ours,” Morgan said.

Vancouver (15 April 2016) — The Seniors Advocate in British Columbia, Isobel Mackenzie, released the Residential Care Facilities Quick Facts Directory (link is external) on March 18, and a recent analysis of the 292 government-funded facilities shows that only 50 are meeting or exceeding the guideline of 3.36 hours per day of care. Given that 10 facilities have no data, that still leaves a whopping 80 per cent of facilities where seniors are not getting the minimum hours of care.

Medicare advocates decry medical tourism Wendy Glauser

See related editorial on page 971 and at www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.141047 Medical tourism conjures up destinations like India and Brazil, but two Toronto hospitals want foreigners to think of Canada for surgeries and cancer treatment. Sunnybrook and University Health Network (UHN) hospitals in Toronto, Ontario, are accepting — and charging — foreign patients, yet refusing to disclose key details about their medical tourism programs, which has raised red flags among medicare advocates.

Sunnybrook Hospital launched a program to treat medical tourists in January, while UHN formalized its program three years ago. Under the programs, medical tourists travel specifically for treatment and pay much higher rates than Canadian patients — which is a far cry from the humanitarian or emergency treatment of international visitors.

National Post Mon Sep 29 2014

Former deputy prime minister Herb Gray, who was a member of Parliament when medicare was adopted in 1966, was forced to wait in the emergency room at The Ottawa Hospital on a stretcher for 48 hours before being moved to a bed, his widow Sharon Sholzberg-Gray says. Mr. Gray, one of the longest-serving MPs in Canadian history, died at the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital in April. He was 82. Mr. Gray suffered from Parkinson's disease, which meant he had frequent falls. That and other chronic conditions sent him to hospital by ambulance four or five times, said Ms. Sholzberg-Gray, where he had to wait in the emergency department on a stretcher until a bed became available. Ms. Sholzberg-Gray, a lawyer who was president of the Canadian Healthcare Association in the late 1990s, said even a career as an advocate for changes that were needed in the health-care system didn't prepare her for the stress and anxiety of having a frail loved one on a stretcher in emergency for so long. Such a long wait without a real hospital bed worsens a patient's condition, she said. "You can't even get off the bed yourself." Spending days in the emergency room, she said, "does not create the best conditions for your future health status."

Ms. Sholzberg-Gray said the issues she had argued about as an advocate "became much more real when I faced them day to day." "I spent the last 25 years of my career as president and CEO of different health associations. I was the spokesperson for the publicly funded health system in this country, advocating for appropriate funding so Canadians could have equitable access to programs that met their needs," she said. "Still, I don't think I was prepared for the personal challenge of being the family caregiver and manager and the difficulties that one has to have a continuum of care that was seamless." Ms. Sholzberg-Gray said she doesn't blame the hospital, which provided good care, but she said the health system needs to better meet the needs of the elderly. "The real question is: Should frail elderly people lie behind a curtain for 48 hours? No." The plight of those frail elderly in emergency rooms was highlighted earlier this month when Quebec released a report that found nonambulatory patients - the majority of them seniors - wait an average of 18.4 hours in the emergency room. The Canadian Medical Association is calling for the federal government to take leadership in developing a national seniors strategy. Seniors, notes association president Dr. Chris Simpson, account for 45%-50% of health-care spending, and that will grow.

The new NDP government has Alberta health-care advocates hopeful. “We’re definitely hoping that they will stay true to their values in terms of supporting the expansion and protection of public health care,” said Sandra Azocar, executive director for the Friends of Medicare. The now defeated Progressive Conservative government under Jim Prentice had proposed a budget that introduced a health care levy and about $1 billion in heath care cuts.

Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta agrees.

The Globe and Mail Sat May 23 2015

It's 4:30 on a Friday afternoon at her Sherbrooke, Que., clinic and Marie Hayes takes a deep breath before opening the door to her final patient of the day, who has arrived without an appointment. The 32-year-old mother immediately lists her complaints: She feels dizzy. She has abdominal pain. "It is always physical and always catastrophic," Dr. Hayes will later tell me. In the exam room, she runs through the standard checkup, pressing on the patient's abdomen, recording her symptoms, just as she has done almost every week for months. "There's something wrong with me," the patient says, with a look of panic. Dr. Hayes tries to reassure her, to no avail. In any case, the doctor has already reached her diagnosis: severe anxiety. Dr. Hayes prescribed medication during a previous visit, but the woman stopped taking it after two days because it made her nauseated and dizzy. She needs structured psychotherapy - a licensed therapist trained to bring her anxiety under control. But the wait list for public care is about a year, says Dr. Hayes, and the patient can't afford the cost of private sessions.

Meanwhile, the woman is paying a steep personal price: At home, she says, she spends most days in bed. She is managing to care for her two young children - for now - but her husband also suffers from anxiety, and the situation is far from ideal. Dr. Hayes does her best, spending a full hour trying to calm her down, and the woman is less agitated when she leaves. But the doctor knows she will be back next week. And that their meeting will go much the same as it did today. In its broad strokes, this is a scene that repeats itself in thousands of doctors' offices every day, right across the country. It is part and parcel of a system that denies patients the best scientific-based care, and comes with a massive price tag, to the economy, families and the health care system. Canadian physicians bill provincial governments $1-billion a year for "counselling and psychotherapy" - one third of which goes to family doctors - a service many of them acknowledge they are not best suited to provide, and that doesn't come close to covering patient need. Meanwhile, psychologists and social workers are largely left out of the publicly funded health-care system, their expertise available only to Canadians with the resources to pay for them.

Advocate for seniors Cecile Cassista says government should explain changes to policy in person

May 21, 2015

A seniors advocate says the provincial government should explain changes to its nursing home policy in person, instead of using an ad campaign.

July 21, 2015

July 16, 2015 (St. John's, NL): After a week of activities organized by health care advocates from across the country calling for federal leadership to ensure universal access to public health care, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Paul Davis has announced that the he and his provincial counterparts are asking the federal government to increase the health-related transfers to the provinces.  "We are pleased to have the Premiers join our call for Federal reinvestment in health care," says Melissa Newitt, Interim National Coordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition. "A 25% contribution from the Federal government would move us in the right direction but it does not end there. We need federal leadership to create a National Drug Plan and a National Strategy for Seniors Care."

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

VICTORIA - British Columbia’s seniors advocate released a startling new report highlighting three issues, which she stresses are of immediate concern. Isobel Mackenzie says the findings suggest many seniors have been incorrectly placed in residential care, which is taking up valuable spots “If we are filling even 5 per cent of these scarce beds with folks who could live independently, that is 1500 beds that could open up province-wide.” The second concern is overuse of medication.  Findings in the report suggests 34 percent of seniors living in residential care are being prescribed antipsychotic medication, while only four percent of these seniors have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.  And nearly half of seniors in this category are being prescribed antidepressants, while only a quarter of them have been diagnosed with depression.