The "Defining the Medicare 'Basket' Project" is a three-year, pan-Canadian, multi-disciplinary research effort that will examine the ways in which allocation and access decisions are made in the Canadian health care system.
The research is being led by three Co-Principal Investigators:
The project manager for the project is Greig Hinds
The project's main sponsors are the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.
The host facility for the project is the Health Law and Policy Group at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. The project is assisted by emerging scholars drawn from this Faculty.
For a more detailed description of the project, see About the Project
The Toronto Star newspaper recently published an opinion piece by the Project's Colleen Flood and Greig Hinds with respect to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board. More op-ed's are in the pipeline; keep an eye on the papers and this website.
The First Ministers' Accord on Health Renewal and the Future of Home Care in Canada Sanober S. Motiwala, Colleen M. Flood, Peter C. Coyte and Audrey Laporte Longwoods Review Vol.2, No.4, 2005
ABSTRACT
On February 5, 2003, the Prime Minister and Premiers of seven provinces signed an agreement, the First Ministers' Accord on Health Care Renewal, outlining the direction of public healthcare in Canada in the near future. The Accord addressed several key issues in healthcare, namely prescription drug coverage, home care, diagnostic services, timeliness of care and primary healthcare reform. This paper critiques the home-care initiatives outlined by the First Ministers, on the grounds that they do not speak to issues of access to long-term care or to non-professional home care - services that are deemed critical by the elderly who wish to stay at home and who represent an increasing proportion of the country's population. Furthermore, the Accord does not establish legislative protection or separate funding, both of which are necessary to ensure that home care as a whole receives an adequate share of resources and political attention over the medium and long-term. http://www.longwoods.com/LReview/LR24/LR24Motiwala.html
Policy framework for facility-based long-term care proposed (Feb 25, 2005)
The Canadian Healthcare Association has released a comprehensive overview of the current state of facility-based long-term care in Canada. The association says there are broad inequities in this sector, "But it is often not until the later years of life that Canadians discover that health services, which they believe are available to them, are not provided outside hospitals in an all-encompassing publicly funded system." The Policy Brief - titled "Stitching the Patchwork Quilt Together" - can be purchased from the CHA at its website here: http://www.cha.ca/publishing/ltcc.htm
This conference was held on Tuesday 30 November 2004 and was a great success for the project. The audience was a mix of academics, policy makers, and representatives from other organisations from within the health care community. All of the presentations - from both our project team members and from our invited guest, Dr Glen Roberts from the Conference Board of Canada - stimulated very useful and interesting discussion.
For more information, click here to find the programme and the slide presentations.
As part of the Project's research into 'Reconciling Public Values', the team is seeking to gather information about how to develop a principled framework for decision making. The two most recent commissions on health care (Romanow and Kirby) referred to the idea of Medicare being shaped by and consistent with Canadian 'values'. But what do we mean by 'values'? How are we to make resource allocations in the health care sector that ascribe to these Canadian values? Any principled framework will need to consider several factors: these 'values', technical evidence, and financial considerations. This workshop has brought together the leading thinkers on justice and fairness in decision making to discuss the ethics of cost-effectiveness as a consideration in decision making. On 9 and 10 December, an invited audience of academics and policy makers heard presentations from leading scholars such as Norm Daniels, Dan Brock, and Ezekiel Emanuel. A full report will soon be made available on this website.
We are very grateful to Health Canada and to the Department of Philosophy for their generous support in holding this event.
As you may recall, the Faculty of Law and the Project organised the National Health Law Conference held in Toronto in January 2004. The conference was a great success with registration applications exceeding venue capacity. We recognised that the issues discussed at the conference struck a chord with attendees and so we have begun work on a volume containing the vast majority of the presentations shown at the conference. Professor Colleen Flood is currently working with the University of Toronto Press to edit the volume for publication in late (Winter) 2005. We are very grateful to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care for its generous support in the publication of this volume.
Two of our working papers - the review of Medical Consultants within provincial governments and the role of the Physician Services Committee in Ontario - have been submitted to journals for publication. The PSC paper will be forthcoming in the Alberta Health Law Review.