What Will Canada Do to Fix Its Senior Care Fail? thetyee.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thetyee.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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OTTAWA, ON, Feb. 22, 2021 /CNW/ - Canadians are proud of our publicly funded health care system and believe that everyone deserves access to quality, universal health care. Medicare is part of our national identity. The
Canada Health Act ensures all Canadians have access to medically necessary health care services based on need, not their ability or willingness to pay.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are worrying about many things, and should not have to worry about how to pay for needed medical care. In the midst of this pandemic, it is clear how vitally important our universal health care is.
By the time Bob Thoms, a retired engineer, entered long-term care, he had already experienced a series of harrowing health crises. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in his late 50s, then lymphoma a few months later. In the wake of chemotherapy, his cognitive abilities began to deteriorate. Doctors chalked it up to “chemo brain.” “He just wasn’t him anymore,” his younger brother, Bill, says. Around the same time, undergoing surgery for a perforated ulcer, Bob flatlined on the operating table and was technically dead for six minutes.
Bob lived alone in an apartment on Wellesley Street. Bill and their sister, Susan Hynes, checked in on him several times a week. After Bob inexplicably tossed a lit cigarette down the garbage chute of his building, causing a fire, they realized they couldn’t provide the level of care he needed. He hated the first home they put him in too many old people, he said so they moved him to Guildwood, a long-term care facility in Scarborough. It seeme
B.C. Minister of Health Shirley Bond pledged her government’s support to maintaining public health care in the province, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling on private health care in Quebec last week.
On June 9 the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Jacques Chaoulli, a Quebec resident who challenged that province’s legislation prohibiting people from paying for private health care services. Chaoulli’s challenge came after he was forced to wait months for knee replacement surgery in the mid-1990s.
Bond said the ruling will have no immediate effect on B.C. but her ministry will be examining the potential affect on the future of health care in the province.
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Half of Canadians don’t even know what palliative care is, so why is it so important?
A researcher at the University of Alberta is helping to bridge a gap in Canadians’ knowledge about palliative care and how to plan ahead for it.
In a 2016 IPSOS public poll, half of Canadians surveyed said they were unfamiliar with the terms “palliative care” and “advance care planning.”
“As patients and families with serious illness needing care go, if only half of them even know the terms, they don’t know how to plan or what to expect for care,” said Konrad Fassbender, assistant professor in the Division of Palliative Care Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.