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The Human Face of Healthcare
By Zoltan Nagy
 When health administrators, politicians, health economists or policy experts of any persuasion provide commentary on the state of our health care system, we are presented with numbers – enormous numbers quite often. Five million Canadians don’t have a family physician, twenty three thousand die each year from in-hospital errors, two million Canadians are waiting to see a specialist, to get an MRI, or to have surgery.
While big numbers can give us a glimpse into the scope of the problem, they also tend to dehumanize the issue, and paradoxically, shield us from reality. Can a healthy person truly comprehend the everyday suffering of a 42 year old mother who is waiting ten months to see a neurosurgeon and another ten months for a routine operation to regain her ability to walk? Or of a 14 year old soccer player who is waiting 10 months for a simple knee ligament operation and potentially loose her scholarship? Or of a 74 year old otherwise healthy grandfather who is waiting (and wasting) two years for a hip replacement?
Big numbers can give us a bird’s eye view, but cannot get across what’s happing on the ground: the human side of the story. Policy makers can tell us that wait times are decreasing, but that is cold comfort for patients who are languishing on wait lists. We pride ourselves as a society in being kind to its citizens, yet when it comes to health, many of us are still paralyzed by needless suffering in the name of outdated principles, simple expediency or poor management. Political grandstanding can also sweep the interest of patients under the carpet of alleged “common interest,” as we have seen in Ontario recently.
We often hear that private health care is for the rich. Experience shows that nothing can be further from the truth. The rich go to the super-hospitals of the US, Europe and Asia, and they have been doing this inconspicuously for decades. What we don’t hear much about is the average Canadian leaning on the private health care sector in Canada: the 42 year old mother from Saskatoon, the 14 year old soccer player from Surrey, or the 74 year old grandfather from Laval. They turn to private clinics because they are not willing to suffer needlessly and put their lives on hold.
The private health sector was never meant to replace the public system. Its role is to provide choice, superior service, and higher standards of care. Private clinic patients are often astonished to find that they are treated with dignity, respect and genuine compassion: they are treated like human beings. This experience changes their frame of reference and turns them into savvy and demanding health care consumers. Who wouldn’t benefit from that?
This issue of Health Frontiers News brings to you expert opinion on innovation and opportunities in the health care arena:
- Dr. Brian Day reviews what governments should do to remove some of the most damaging incentives from our health care model, and empower individuals to make decisions affecting their lives based on quality of care and level of service. Patient focused funding worked in Great Britain and other OECD countries; there is no reason why it shouldn’t work in Canada.
- Kieran Bridge’s column traces the evolution of how federal and provincial governments ended up effectively legislating a multi-tier health care funding system in Canada and why it makes a substantial difference if you, for example, injured your knee in a car accident or in your backyard.
- Bert Brown, in his second article, asks a number of not-so-rhetorical questions about the damaging personal and economic effects of waiting too long to introduce some common sense solutions in health care funding and delivery.
Pioneering change with your support,
Zoltan Nagy
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