While many Canadians believe we have one of the best health care systems in the world, recent international rankings for health care quality place Canada in the middle or at the bottom of the pack. This report calls for the establishment of common and measureable goals to achieve quality improvement in Canada’s health care systems.
This report describes the socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of individuals hospitalized for concurrent mental illness and substance use disorders. The analysis also compares the impact of concurrent disorders on the use of inpatient hospital mental health services with that of mental illness or substance use disorders alone.
Drug spending continues to increase in Canada; overall annual growth has slowed to its lowest rate in 16 years.
Drug Expenditure in Canada, 1985 to 2012 updates trends in drug spending in Canada, primarily from retail establishments, in total, by public and private payers, and by type of drug (prescribed and non-prescribed). Provincial/territorial and international comparisons are included.
Companion Products
Data Tables, 1985 to 2012 (https://secure.cihi.ca/estore/productFamily.htm?locale=en&pf=PFC2146&lang=en&media=0)
Canadians want to know more about the health care system that they care about. There are currently few places to go for factual, easy to understand information about the health care system.
Healthy Debate attempts to fill this gap by making every effort to provide unbiased information that will lead to thoughtful deliberation and informed opinions.
Our vision: A high quality health care system designed by an informed population.
Our mission: 1. To provide accurate, easily accessible information about health care to the public, practitioners, students, managers and policy makers. 2. To provide a forum for accessible and thoughtful deliberation about Alberta, Ontario and Canada’s health care systems. 3. To increase the frequency with which health system leaders use evidence and informed public input when making policy and management decisions.
The Evidence-Informed Healthcare Renewal (EIHR) Portal is a continuously updated repository of policy-relevant documents that address ‘healthcare renewal’ in Canada. It contains 24 types of documents, including jurisdictional reviews, stakeholder position papers, and intergovernmental communiqués. The documents address priority areas identified by Canadian federal, provincial and territorial governments, such as primary healthcare, patient safety, health human resources and performance indicators (e.g., timely access).
The EIHR Portal can save health system policymakers and stakeholders time by helping them to rapidly identify:
documents on a given topic that have been prepared to inform healthcare renewal in Canada;
how recently the document was published;
links to user-friendly summaries and full-text reports (if applicable and when freely available); and
any related documents already included in Health Systems Evidence (e.g., systematic reviews and economic evaluations in these priority areas).
The EIHR Portal, an initiative of the Evidence-Informed Healthcare Renewal (EIHR) Roundtable, is managed through a collaboration between the McMaster Health Forum, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
A first in Canada, this online resource developed by CBC's flagship investigative news program, the fifth estate, is designed to bring more transparency and accountability to our health care system and to arm Canadians with the information they need to inform themselves when preparing for a hospital stay. We relied on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) as reported by more than 600 Canadian hospitals. CIHI is a taxpayer-funded non-profit organization that acts as a storehouse of statistics on Canadian hospitals and other health-care data.
Users of the website can look up individual hospital profiles and make their own assessments based on information such as how many patients died after major surgery or how often patients are forced to return to hospital after being sent home.
We have supplemented these ratings with other information that should be easily available but isn't always — crucial data such as the incidence of the common hospital-acquired infections C. difficile and MRSA, emergency department wait times, nurse staffing levels and pain control.
The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA), in partnership with the National Advisory Council (NAC) on Prescription Drug Misuse, released a comprehensive 10-year, pan-Canadian strategy on April 2, 2013, First Do No Harm: Responding to Canada’s Prescription Drug Crisis. The strategy highlights the action required to address the devastating harms associated with prescription drugs in Canada in the areas of prevention, education, treatment, monitoring and surveillance, and enforcement.
Wondering about the most common major injuries in Canada? This report provides information on major trauma hospitalizations in participating facilities across Canada, including the most common causes and types of severe injury, as well as patient characteristics such as age and sex.
Regulated Nurses: Canadian Trends, 2007 to 2011 draws on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information's Nursing Database, which covers the three regulated nursing professions in Canada: registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and registered psychiatric nurses (RPNs).
