It’s frustrating to know that Canada could have invested in health care in times of plenty and been much better prepared for this outbreak, write Dr. Hance Clarke and Imran Abdool.
This column is an opinion by Dr. Hance Clarke, the director of pain services at the Toronto General Hospital (TGH), and Imran Abdool, president of Blue Krystal Technologies and Business Insights. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
In the short-term we are fighting COVID-19, but eventually the dust will settle. It always does. However, pandemics will happen again. We must win this battle and ensure we win the broader war on pandemic preparedness.
For too long, health-care experts have warned of under-funding and a lack of resources in the sector. Sadly, those chickens have now come home to roost.
A healthy population builds strong economies, but too often those strong economies under-invest in their health-care sectors. Case in point: after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, Canada emerged as one of the stronger economies. Despite this enviable position, repeated calls for health care investment and news clips of over-capacity hospitals received only a lukewarm response from policy makers.
Hallway medicine became the accepted norm as patients waited days in the ER for hospital beds. It was a warning sign Canadians failed to heed.
The current toolbox of government initiatives now being deployed to cope with a pandemic that is already underway is a poor solution for a system under stress. Given the lack of a vaccine or a cure for COVID-19, society is scrambling to build ventilators and calling upon every physician and health care worker to shore up the front lines — at best, a desperate reaction.
It’s frustrating to know that Canada could have been much better prepared for this outbreak.
This is how New Brunswick’s 450 respiratory therapists are preparing to keep COVID-19 patients alive on mechanical ventilators. 4:57
Prime Minister Trudeau recently acknowledged Dr. Joe Fisher, a professor in the department of anesthesiology and pain medicine at Toronto General Hospital in the University Health Network (UHN), in his daily address to Canada, for example. Dr. Fisher’s company, Thornhill Medical, created a novel portable intensive care unit, operated by battery power, which has a ventilator and can perform vital signs monitoring. This is a