HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27527
Sara Allin, Audrey Laporte
{"title":"Is the <i>Canada Health Act</i> Untouchable?","authors":"Sara Allin, Audrey Laporte","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27527","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27527","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue marks the 40th anniversary of the <i>Canada Health Act</i> (1985). Though it remains an iconic symbol of national pride, it may not be untouchable. The papers in this issue critically examine the strengths and limitations of the <i>Canada Health Act</i> in the context of persistent health system challenges and gaps in coverage. They also provide constructive recommendations for a path forward for a reimagined legislative framework to better achieve the agreed-upon goals of reasonable and equitable access to a comprehensive basket of health services in Canada.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 3","pages":"5-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143675148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27529
Bill Tholl, Greg Marchildon
{"title":"The Time is Ripe for Canada Health Act 2.0.","authors":"Bill Tholl, Greg Marchildon","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27529","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27529","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although the <i>Canada Health Act</i> (CHA) (1985) has largely achieved its original purpose over the past 40 years, the challenges facing the Canadian health system today call for substantive updating and strengthening. This CHA 2.0 would recognize a major shift in primary care and include as insured services primary care providers beyond physicians. Other areas that should be addressed include ensuring substantive and timely access to insured services (with a proposed primary care guarantee) and provisions for greater transparency and accountability. These improvements would be better achieved through a CHA 2.0 and a more accountable Canada Health Transfer rather than companion legislation or time-limited federal transfers to provinces and territories. Unlike the CHA, companion legislation would be more easily dismantled by future governments and work against efforts to better integrate health services.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 3","pages":"23-28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143675160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27528
Colleen M Flood, Bryan Thomas
{"title":"Medicare Makeover: Reimagining the <i>Canada Health Act</i> at 40.","authors":"Colleen M Flood, Bryan Thomas","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27528","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27528","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The 40th anniversary of the <i>Canada Health Act</i> (CHA) highlights Canada's commitment to equitable healthcare but underscores its core failing: fractured accountabilities between federal and provincial governments. This misalignment perpetuates inadequate access to primary and specialist care and outdated standards of comprehensiveness, excluding critical services like outpatient pharmaceuticals and mental healthcare. To address these gaps, the CHA requires a fundamental update. We propose a solution: the federal government must require, as a condition for funding, that provinces and territories implement a transparent, evidence-based process to establish clear benchmarks for accessibility - such as wait times - and define the scope of universal publicly funded services. By ensuring the CHA is fit for purpose, it can meet the healthcare needs of Canadians for another 40 years.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 3","pages":"9-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143675151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27370
Ross G Baker, Carol Fancott, Adrienne Zarem
{"title":"Creating a Sustaining Culture for Patient Engagement.","authors":"Ross G Baker, Carol Fancott, Adrienne Zarem","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27370","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27370","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Engagement-capable environments enable strategies and processes supporting patient engagement. However, research using this framework has not fully explored how leaders can help to shape organizational cultures that sustain engagement over time, even during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using interviews and documents from the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, ON, prior to and after the pandemic, we examine the maturation of their engagement practices and culture to illustrate how a supportive culture developed and shaped their responses to this crisis. Further exploration of such dynamics could inform leaders designing engagement strategies with greater impact and sustainment.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 SP","pages":"28-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141861965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27399
Mary Chiu, Marianne Saragosa
{"title":"Key Considerations for the Design, Development and Deployment of AgeTech Solutions Supporting Aging in the Right Place.","authors":"Mary Chiu, Marianne Saragosa","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2024.27399","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>\"The use of technology to support AIRP [aging in the right place] holds great promise,\" (Kokorelias et al. 2024: 16) and ethical and human rights considerations must be considered in the design, development and deployment of AgeTech solutions. This may be realized through interprofessional and intersectoral collaboration, as well as meaningful inclusion and engagement of lived expertise and experience from older adults and their caregivers. Theoretical frameworks and evidence-based design/research models can structure the consultation processes. They can guide the agile and iterative development of AgeTech based on input and feedback from end-users and community stakeholders. Funders and accelerator programs also play an important role in ensuring that AgeTech solutions that they endorse or sponsor would be ethical, accessible and feasible to older adult populations that are ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse at various levels of digital literacy.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 2","pages":"31-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142335947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27367
B C Pomeroy
{"title":"Resilience and Engagement in Crisis: Fostering Trauma-Informed Care and Patient Partnerships Into the Future.","authors":"B C Pomeroy","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27367","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27367","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted patient engagement and exposed long-standing inequities within Canada's healthcare system. As a patient partner and caregiver, the author reflects on the exacerbated challenges during the pandemic, particularly for hardly reached communities and those managing chronic conditions. The crisis highlighted the absence of opportunities for patient partnership, with healthcare organizations halting engagement activities despite an increased need for communication and community involvement. The pandemic underlined the necessity of trauma-informed care and engagement-capable environments (ECE). To address these challenges, the author advocates for integrating trauma-informed practices with ECEs, thereby promoting a healthcare model that is both structurally supportive and responsive to individual trauma and resilience. By focusing on compassion, recognizing trauma and fostering engagement, such an approach could enhance patient outcomes and create a more adaptive, inclusive healthcare environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 SP","pages":"52-58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141861971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27394
Wendy A Rogers, Harshal P Mahajan
{"title":"A Human Factors Approach for Designing, Developing and Deploying Technology for Aging in the Right Place.","authors":"Wendy A Rogers, Harshal P Mahajan","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2024.27394","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Technology to support aging in the right place (AIRP) has much promise, but the potential is not yet being met. In their paper outlining the opportunities and challenges in the use of technology to support AIRP, Kokorelias et al. (2024) provided a roadmap for the next steps. Our commentary focuses on two questions they raised: (1) How can technology be designed and developed to better meet the specific needs, preferences and abilities of older adults? (2) How do we evaluate technology in natural settings? Widespread technology adoption will emerge from consideration of the users; an understanding of their unique needs; iterative participatory design and user testing; and support for facilitating conditions to ease deployment into people's lives and minimize abandonment.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 2","pages":"65-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142335934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27398
Maurita T Harris, Stephanie Kiggundu, Michelle Goonasekera
{"title":"Addressing Aging-in-Place Policy Challenges in Canada: A Call to Action.","authors":"Maurita T Harris, Stephanie Kiggundu, Michelle Goonasekera","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27398","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27398","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Aging in place (AIP) has emerged as a critical priority in policy to support older adults living in their homes and communities. However, achieving equitable support for older adults demands a multi-faceted approach that embraces their choices, capabilities and lived experiences while considering that <i>place</i> is a dynamic concept. This commentary explores the challenges older adults may encounter while AIP and identifies technological and policy areas to explore. Drawing insights from the UK, policy makers in Canada are urged to adopt inclusive definitions of AIP, prioritize technological solutions for recognized challenges and actively involve older adults in policy development.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 2","pages":"38-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142335935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27397
Jing Zhao Forrest, Mirana Randriambelonoro
{"title":"Leveraging Technology to Support Aging in Place: Opportunities, Challenges and Recommendations.","authors":"Jing Zhao Forrest, Mirana Randriambelonoro","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2024.27397","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The aging population presents pressing societal challenges, emphasizing the importance of aging in the right place to support older individuals' quality of life. Technology can play a crucial role in facilitating aging in place by enabling multiple factors such as remote healthcare monitoring, social connectivity and access to essential services. However, several challenges must be addressed to ensure widespread adoption and effective usage of technology among older adults. From integrating digital literacy into the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations n.d.) to promoting co-creation and fostering intergenerational dialogue, multiple solutions can be envisioned. This commentary emphasizes these opportunities, discusses these issues and provides a set of recommendations.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 2","pages":"45-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142335948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2024.27364
Kerry Kuluski, Carol Fancott, Maggie Keresteci, Amy Lang, Ross G Baker
{"title":"Beyond the Crisis: Transforming Health Systems Through Community Engagement.","authors":"Kerry Kuluski, Carol Fancott, Maggie Keresteci, Amy Lang, Ross G Baker","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27364","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2024.27364","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How can we effectively partner during crises? How can partnership with communities, patients, caregivers, providers and leaders be sustained and even evolve during difficult times? The opening paper of this special issue (Kuluski et al. 2024) probed these questions. The six response papers in this issue emphasized engagement that moves from partnership with individuals and communities to efforts that are led by communities; trauma-informed approaches at an individual and organizational level; and shed light on the interdependency of culture and leadership. By broadening our engagement efforts with communities, we are more apt to co-produce improvements in care that also address the social determinants of health.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 SP","pages":"72-77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141861964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}