I’ve got a good friend with a bad job.
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Way back in 2007, I and many others encouraged Sylvia Jones to run for public office. She is smart, cares deeply about people and has a quiet confidence that is infectious.
To no one’s surprise, she won the 2007 election and many more since.
She has represented the fine people of Dufferin-Caledon in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for almost two decades. Being an MPP is a great job. Sylvia’s time in cabinet has included a stint as Solicitor General, another great job.
But she drew a bad card when she landed at the Ministry of Health. It’s not that she isn’t a great fit for the task. She has the right skills and experience to oversee a huge and complex ministry. I can’t think of anyone who would do a better job.
The trouble is, the Ministry of Health is difficult to manage and impossible to lead.
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Public health care in Canada has become a morass of unfulfilled promises, frustrated providers, bureaucratic quagmires and political doom. If your job is leading health care in Canada, you wake every morning to a dysfunctional, deteriorating system. It’s just the way it is.
Canadian health care is the natural habitat of irony. It’s free but you can’t get it. It’s too expensive and it’s underfunded. Canadians are world leaders in waiting for health care. The system is sick.
There are three barriers to healing health care.
The first barrier is our version of public health care. In Canada, the government has a monopoly on both health insurance and provision. The normal dynamic between insurer and provider simply doesn’t exist.
Despite rumours to the contrary, governments have health-care budgets and the job of the ministry is to control costs within the budget. Effectively this means the minister of health is responsible for rationing health care. That doesn’t sound like fun.
The funding model produces a tangled mess of acronyms that compete for health-care dollars. Nurses, doctors, hospitals, community care agencies, ambulances, emergency clinics and many, many more compete for funding — and everyone loses.
The second big problem is growth. Simply put, more people are needing more care. You can’t build and equip hospitals or educate and train health-care workers at the rate our population is expanding, particularly when the system is failing to meet the critical needs of the current population. If there isn’t enough capacity, people are turned away or underserved.
That is unacceptable but, at least in our current system, unavoidable.
The third big problem is you and me. Modern lifestyles have us overfed and undernourished and way too sedentary. Worse, we expect health care to overcome unhealthy lifestyles and it can’t, which leaves a good number of us mad at the government.
And here is the kicker — while we don’t like waiting (sometimes endlessly) for care we also don’t want to change the system that makes us wait.
Health care in Canada needs to change. There is no simple, pain-free fix. As we have demonstrated repeatedly over the last two decades, simply dumping cash on a dysfunctional system won’t make health care better.
Sylvia Jones and the other ministers of health can’t fix the problem unless we are willing to encourage and support the disruption inherent in large-scale change. So far, we aren’t.
Which leaves some talented people endlessly patching holes in a broken system. And that doesn’t sound like a fun job.
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SNOBELEN: Overseeing dysfunctional health-care system a difficult task
6
0
08.01.2024
I’ve got a good friend with a bad job.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.
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Way back in 2007, I and many others encouraged Sylvia Jones to run for public office. She is smart, cares deeply about people and has a quiet confidence that is infectious.
To no one’s surprise, she won the 2007 election and many more since.
She has represented the fine people of Dufferin-Caledon in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for almost two decades. Being an MPP is a great job. Sylvia’s time in cabinet has included a stint as Solicitor General, another great job.
But she drew a bad card when she landed at the Ministry of Health. It’s not that she isn’t a great fit for the task. She has the right skills and experience to oversee a huge and complex ministry. I can’t think of anyone who would do a better job.
The trouble is, the Ministry of Health is difficult to manage and impossible to lead.
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