Failing Health
The Rise and Fall of Canada's Health Care System
by Stephen R. Barron

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Do you believe Canada’s health care system is working as well as it should be? Despite having a publicly funded health care system, Canadians have suffered for years from a shortage of family doctors, excessively long wait times for specialists and investigations, overcrowded emergency departments, and “hallway medicine” in our hospitals. It wasn’t always like this. After over 40 years as a front-line traditional family doctor, Dr. Steve Barron outlines the vital signs warning us that Canada’s health care system has reached a crisis point. He traces the history of our publicly funded system, from its inception in the 1960s to the beginning of its decline in the 1990s, until the current day state of affairs. What happened in the 1990s set off a chain of events that sent a healthy system into failure. Get deep into the published data and peer-reviewed literature with Dr. Barron, and explore the origins of hospital bed shortages, long wait times, family doctor shortage, and health professional burnout. Dr. Barron follows a medical model to get the answers. He takes a history and makes a diagnosis. He then writes a prescription with specific operational goals that will put our system on the road to recovery, with a primary focus on high quality patient-centred care.

www.failinghealthsystem.ca

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Dr. Steve Barron was a family doctor for over 40 years. For 25 years, he also served as a Clinical Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. In his first 20 years as a family doctor, the system worked well. In his last 20 years, the system didn’t work very well. He lived through the rise and fall of Canada’s health care system. Now retired, he lives in the Lower Mainland of, British Columbia.

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Contributors

Author

Stephen R. Barron

Photographer

Stephen R. Barron

Photographer

Gary Morrissey