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A unique website from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) will allow Canadian hospitals, health regions, provinces and territories to compare how they measure up on 37 indicators related to access, quality of care, patient safety and emerging health trends across the country.

“This website and its data should help health sector leaders make decisions about the delivery of health services based on comparisons with leading practices. Our experiences and those in other jurisdictions show that public reporting like this makes our health system function more effectively. In spring 2015, we will release similar comparative data for long-term care facilities across the country.”

Using data provided to CIHI over several years from Canadian hospitals, as well as other data sources, the website can measure a broad range of topics, including hospital readmission rates, rates of in-hospital infection from sepsis, avoidable deaths from treatable causes and hospital deaths following major surgery. Indicators of the health status of Canadians by province and region are also available, including average life expectancy at birth and at age 65, and the number of hospitalizations due to heart attacks and strokes.

The Globe and Mail Thu Sep 3 2015

Parents of a four-year-old battling a rare form of cancer reflect on how polished their doctor was giving them heartbreaking news. A transgender male explains how he felt stigmatized by the health-care system when looking for help. A daughter brings her ailing mother home to die. And a nurse practitioner with a positive outlook visits inner-city patients.

These are some of the personal accounts profiled on the website Faces of Health Care, a recent initiative that seeks to bring the human face back into the health policy picture. Inspired by the work of photographer Brandon Stanton on his popular blog Humans of New York, the photojournalism project uses portraits and quotes of patients and practitioners to tell the stories of Canadians who interact with the health care system.

by Wendy Glauser, Joshua Tepper & Jill Konkin (Show all posts by Wendy Glauser, Joshua Tepper & Jill Konkin) January 7, 2016

The health inequities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians have long been shamefully apparent – the various studies finding infant mortality rates in Indigenous populations to be 1.7 to four times that of non-Indigenous populations; the diabetes prevalence that’s nearly twice that of non-Indigenous people; the fact that Indigenous people are six times more likely to suffer alcohol-related deaths; and many more.

Better support for health workers in Indigenous communities

Heartbleed Vulnerability at CIHI What is it? The Heartbleed vulnerability is a critical vulnerability affecting specific versions of OpenSSL, an extensively deployed open source library used in the products of many vendors. Has CIHI been compromised? No. Overall, the impact of this vulnerability for CIHI so far has been “low,” since none of the publicly available websites that we host internally were affected.  What is CIHI doing about it? Fortunately, we detected this issue early and immediately assessed our website and external systems and proactively applied any necessary remediation. We are continuing to audit our external systems and working with our vendors to ensure we proactively address any issues that may arise.

Statistics on infectious diseases in hospitals - including fast-spreading superbugs - will be published on Horizon Health Network's website as of May 1.

New Brunswick hospitals have been under pressure to publish the number of people suffering from ailments from so-called superbugs that are resistant to antibiotic treatment following a recent incident at the Dr. Georges-L-Dumont University Hospital in Moncton.

"no answer at this time" when asked if Vitalité would begin publicly reporting the number of cases of C. difficile or other superbugs.

More day surgeries will be done at private clinics in Regina and Saskatoon after the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative got a cash infusion in Wednesday’s provincial budget. To shorten surgical wait times, $70.5 million was allocated to the Surgical Initiative — a $20-million increase. “Over the last year, in large part due to a higher demand for surgeries than we had forecasted at the beginning of the last fiscal year, we started to see our surgical wait times start to creep up again,” Health Minister Dustin Duncan told the Leader-Post on budget day.

In 2010, the provincial government introduced the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative — a plan to shorten surgical wait times. At the time, the government promised no patient would wait longer than three months for elective surgery by 2014. Although the initiative concluded in March 2014, wait time information continues to be updated on the website monthly. According to the latest data on the Surgical Initiative’s website, 1,934 patients in the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region (RQHR) and 2,835 in the Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) had waited more than three months at the end of March. There were 317 RQHR patients and 1,000 SHR patients who had already waited longer than six months for surgery on March 31.  The SHR saw a 7.5-per-cent growth in demand for surgeries from April 2015 to April 2016

'I am hoping Health Canada will step up,' says mom whose son will run out of critical medication

May 20, 2016

So much depends on a little white pill in the Smith household.  Nicholas, 16, needs Clobazam three times a day to keep his epileptic seizures in check and his life on track.  Problem is, his supply is set to run out on Aug. 1 because of a countrywide shortage. "It is heartbreaking," said his mother, Tina Smith, who lives in Guelph, Ont.

Topic: PharmacarePublication date: Thu, 2013-12-12

As you may know, every developed country with a universal health care system provides universal coverage of prescription drugs ... except Canada! This is gap in Canadian "medicare" is costing us dearly. One in ten Canadians cannot afford to fill prescriptions their doctors write for them. Millions of Canadian patients who do fill prescriptions do so at considerable cost to themselves and their families. Canadian physicians have fewer tools and incentives for optimal prescribing than doctors in comparable countries. And overall, the fragmented pharmacare systems found in Canada all lack the administrative efficiency and purchasing power of a single-payer system -- a power that could save Canadians as much as $14-billion per year! Many more (deliberately-short) facts and arguments can be found on pharmacare2020.ca. Please visit it and share it with your networks - - professional and personal!

Feb 19, 2014

WHY:  The federal-provincial Health Accord expires March 31, 2014. Since 2011, Ottawa has refused to meet with the Premiers to sign a new Accord. Instead, the federal Conservative government plans to cut $36 billion from public health care.

Mary Catherine McCarthy 613-237-1590, ext 203, mmccarthy@cupe.ca. Please let her know what you are planning so we can add it to this website and let others know.

Toronto Star Tue Sep 23 2014

Patients profiled by the Star said no one volunteered to them they were infected at the clinic - not the Rothbart clinic, not James, not Toronto Public Health (TPH), which investigated the outbreak, and not the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), which has regulatory oversight of such clinics, known as "out-of-hospital" premises. The TPH investigation included an infection-control audit, done in conjunction with Public Health Ontario. It found 170 deficiencies, including improperly sterilized equipment. TPH has never made the results of its investigation public. The CPSO inspected the clinic a number of times after the outbreak. Its online register shows it gave the clinic "conditional" passes for three inspections, with conditions related to improving infection control. But there is no mention on the CPSO website there was an outbreak, infection-control breaches or people were made ill. Gelinas said she is "really, really worried" that the province is moving services out of hospitals and into clinics that do not have the same level of oversight and accountability.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins said in a written statement that improving transparency in the health system is a top priority. He noted that the CPSO last year amended a bylaw allowing details of inspection outcomes to be posted on its website. Kacho only learned on Saturday evening that her meningitis was linked to her treatment at the clinic. That's when she said she got a "shocking" phone call from a TPH official. TPH has been trying to reach the nine patients infected since Friday, the day before the Star article appeared. "We are in the process of contacting these individuals as a courtesy and to ensure transparency. Our goal is to ensure that patients were aware that an investigation that they were part of was likely going to be profiled by a media outlet," TPH spokesperson Lenore Bromley said. TPH earlier this month told the Star that the infected patients had been contacted during the outbreak, at which time they were informed of the investigation into the clinic and told there had been breaches in infection control.

Find our how your city's or region's health care measures up CBC News Posted: Nov 07, 2013

A new website aims to provide Canadians with a user-friendly snapshot of how the health system is performing. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) released its interactive tool, OurHealthSystem.ca, on Thursday.

The Globe and Mail Wed Jul 22 2015

When the Harper government has something to brag about, we hear about it, endlessly. When the government has something to hide, the information comes out without ministerial comment on a Friday afternoon. So it was last week that the Prime Minister's Office buried a long, detailed report about federal innovation in health care that the government itself had commissioned.

The Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation, chaired by former University of Toronto president and dean of medicine David Naylor, was to have been released at a news conference in Toronto on July 14. The day before the news conference, however, the PMO cancelled it and decided to release the report without notice on the Health Canada website on July 17. Just as the PMO hoped, the report received little attention. Health Minister Rona Ambrose, who was to have spoken about the report, was gagged. The posting on her department's website was timed so that it appeared only after the provincial premiers had finished their final news conference in St. John's, in case the report gave any or all of them ammunition to embarrass the federal government. Such is the way this government works.

Mar. 26 2014

By the end of this year, President Barack Obama’s Sunshine Act will have drug companies report virtually every transfer of value to doctors and academic hospitals. With payments of as little as $10 dollars to be listed on a public website, this marks a serious undertaking in the world’s most sophisticated pharmaceutical market.

To be sure, it will take strong provincial leadership to hold pharmaceutical companies to account. We are calling on the Ontario Ministry of Health to make disclosures of payments to doctors compulsory for any pharma companies with drugs listed on the Ontario Drug Benefit Program. By making this information publicly available on a website, it will no longer fall on the patient to ask whether their physician has been paid by drug makers. This is efficient from a taxpayer’s perspective as it would not involve spending much public money, while it also leverages the bulk buying of drugs to put patients directly in the centre of care.

Calgary Herald Mon Jan 19 2015

Rats scurrying down hospital hallways, chewing through wires and nibbling on food scraps near the cafeteria. These are a few of the recent rodent sightings reported by public health inspectors, nurses and staff members at B.C. Women's and Children's Hospital in Vancouver.

Inspectors issued verbal and written directives after the Dec. 22 visit, according to the environmental health inspection report, which notes: "Minimal pest proofing has been completed to date which is contributing to the difficulty in controlling and abating the rodent activity with the food services." The report also mentions: "A number of food products have been chewed through resulting in products being discarded," and "wiring of equipment chewed on in the retail side which also raises a safety concern." The most recent inspection report lists a "Target Completion Date" for rodent control recommendations as Jan. 27. Taki said the hospital has an action plan in place with the help of the pest control company. "We've asked them to almost quadruple-up on the service until everything gets under control," said Taki.

The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) Mon Nov 23 2015

There is nothing novel about providing some medical services in a private practice setting in Saskatchewan. Imaging services, such as X-rays and ultrasound, are already provided that way. What is novel is to legislate that these services will be privately paid for.

The Canada Health Act requires that medicare finance all "medically necessary" physician services. The intent of the act is that services be distributed on the basis of medical necessity rather than ability to pay. There is no doubt that the new Saskatchewan legislation will restrict access to services if private MRIs are not covered by medicare. Of course, enforcement of the federal Health Act is subject to ministerial discretion. The Saskatchewan government, when it drafted its legislation, was probably confident that the former federal minister would be discreet. It is highly doubtful that the new federal Liberal government will take the same view

Some hospital procedures are paid by OHIP. Most are paid out of global budgets. Each and every procedure is paid for by OHIP in a private clinic — an incentive to do more than medically necessary.

government pays about 50 per cent more to have tests done in the private sector than in a hospital according to a 2008 consultants report.

Last year Ontario hospitals were being allocated $260 per hour to perform MRIs. Hospitals do an average of 1.5 MRIs per hour. Canada Diagnostics, a private for-profit MRI company that operates clinics in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec, states on its website that it charges between $900 and $1,600 for an MRI.

Robert Biron stepped into the CEO job at The Scarborough Hospital last week as the hospital prepared to plunge into work that will determine its future in a short length of time. The hospital's senior administrators were surprised on March 27 when the Central East LHIN, the region's health care overseer, froze their controversial plans to divide all surgical services between the Birchmount and General campuses and to merge their separate birthing centres into one centre at the Birchmount.

It also ordered other teams to do a six-month study - starting with a "directional report" in 60 days - on possible service mergers between the hospital and the Rouge Valley Health System, plus a 90-day review of how maternal and pediatric care could be shared within Scarborough.

During a hospital board meeting last Tuesday, he said one community member from each hospital's catchment area will be appointed by the LHIN to the panel studying integrations between the hospitals.

increasing numbers of Albertans are choosing to pay for memberships at private clinics

In the four years since it opened, Copeman has seen its roster of clients willing to pay the annual charge of up to $3,900 to become patients at its Beltline facility swell from a few hundred into the thousands.

Last summer, it opened a second clinic in Edmonton.