Colin Craig of Second Street talks about health care trends...
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the growing problem of healthcare wait times in Canada, and the potential solutions to the problem. We talk about the role private clinics can play in filling the gaps in healthcare workers across the border in the United States, and how they can fill the gaps.
Transcript
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everyone knows that since covet arrived in canada waiting lists got worse the backlog of
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number of people waiting for surgery diagnostic scans to see a specialist it got worse too
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and so last year we launched a website called canada waits.ca where we've been asking governments
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regularly for data on how many people are waiting for surgery to see a specialist to receive a
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diagnostic scan and so forth and we've been tracking that over time asking governments
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periodically what their numbers are and it's not the easiest exercise i mean you would think
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intuitively they would all want to know and have these figures at the these figures at their
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fingertips but uh it's not always the case and um what we've actually found is from january of this
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year to may there was a positive reduction in the number of people waiting for a diagnostic scan it
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dropped by close to 300 000 cases uh when it comes to surgery there was a slight drop there about
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13 000 cases uh in the number of people waiting and then to see a specialist we saw an increase there
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it was part of it was due to getting some information from a province that we didn't have data from before
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but on the whole we're seeing you know some positive signs i think that this crisis that
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we have in healthcare is going to persist for a long time still though yeah well i just want to
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start with at least a little bit of a positive note you know and then segue into uh your more recent uh
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just released out there which is is where you found that because i mean one of the things if we're
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going to deal with waiting lists we're going to deal with waiting times we know we need more
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healthcare professionals there's a labor shortage all over the the place and you found that almost 10 000
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uh healthcare professionals are licensed to work down in the united states now yeah and a big uh
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asterisk beside that figure is that that's only border states so if you think about all the states
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along the canada u.s border so washington state montana north dakota uh new york pennsylvania and so forth
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um michigan rather uh those jurisdictions we contacted them because they will issue licenses
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for nurses and doctors and we asked for data how many of these are canadian and what they were able
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to share with us are cases where the mailing address for these individuals uh is a canadian address so
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it's a low bulb figure because if you let's say you uh grew up in ontario and you move you're a nurse and
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you've been working in their system for 20 years and you moved to the united states 10 years ago
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well you're still really you know a canadian you just happened to have moved and now your mailing
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address is a u.s address so though all those types of cases wouldn't be captured and obviously we
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wouldn't have data for cases like california and texas and florida and other states where
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they might be seen as a desirable location for canadians to move to but yeah 10 000
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um issued by border states a huge number coming from ontario which isn't too surprising given
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that you have a large population in windsor and then also in the sort of st catherine's niagara
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falls area where they're uh they're close to to buffalo and obviously windsor's across the river
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they're from detroit so uh lots of uh cases of these workers commuting so they live in canada they work in
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the us uh and other in other cases uh these workers indicated to us in a survey that uh they're not
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working there yet but they're planning to so there's an opportunity here for uh government-run
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hospitals they look to fill our labor shortage to try and recruit some of these workers who were
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working in the states but then also to uh try to prevent them from leaving so that's what the
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government can do the positive thing that we're seeing in canada more and more is that governments are
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hiring private clinics to provide health care services to the public and so there's an opportunity
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for these private clinics to offer these workers the types of work arrangements whether it's uh
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compensation or working conditions or the scheduling whatever that they're looking for that maybe the
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government has been too slow and inflexible and unwilling to provide to these workers so there's an
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opportunity there for these private clinics to maybe recruit some of these workers and ultimately lead to