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Healthcare in Canada needs governance – clear, determined leadership to pull its poorly coordinated elements together into a real system and put it on course to meet the needs of the 21st century.

June 8, 2016 – Healthcare in Canada needs governance – clear, determined leadership to pull its poorly coordinated elements together into a real system and put it on course to meet the needs of the 21st century, states a new C.D. Howe Institute Verbatim. In “WANTED: Leadership for Healthcare,” authors Don Drummond, Duncan Sinclair, David M.C. Walker and Christopher S. Simpson outline the necessary steps that leaders must take in revamping Canada’s healthcare system to make it more affordable and accessible for Canadians. These include:

  • Putting in place a secure, electronic health information management system capable of maintaining for each resident of every province and every territory his or her own comprehensive health record.
  • The creation of an independent, arm’s-length healthcare system governance authority answerable ideally to the federal and provincial/territorial governments working together.

 “Canadians and our political leaders are proud, indeed to the point of complacency, of what people refer to as Medicare, touting it as one of the best healthcare systems in the developed world,” state the authors. “If it ever was, it is no longer even close to the best, a hard but plain fact revealed clearly by repeated, objective international surveys.” It is (over)time for Canadian leadership to get on with it, conclude the authors.

For the Verbatim go to:  /verbatim/wanted-leadership-healthcare          

For more information contact: Don Drummond, Stauffer-Dunning Fellow in Global Public Policy and Adjunct Professor, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University; or Colin Busby,  Associate Director, Research, C.D. Howe Institute: 416-865-1904; E-mail: amcbrien@cdhowe.org.

The C.D. Howe Institute is an independent not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies. Widely considered to be Canada's most influential think tank, the Institute is a trusted source of essential policy intelligence, distinguished by research that is nonpartisan, evidence-based and subject to definitive expert review.