Your Health System: In Brief

Your Health System: In Brief provides an opportunity to see the big picture of your health system by exploring how your hospital, city or province/territory is doing. Look at information on Canadian hospitals, long-term care facilities and the health of Canadians to get a snapshot of health care access, quality of care and spending, as well as health promotion and disease prevention and health outcomes. Here are some of the different ways you can check up on the performance of Canada’s health systems.

Health system access

• Health system access takes a look at whether Canadians can obtain the health care they need when they need it
  • Having access to a regular health care provider is an important factor in ensuring that all Canadians are treated for medical conditions and provided with preventive care and early screening (data available for those age 12 and older)
  • Wait times for radiation treatment are critical for patients with cancer — see how many cancer patients obtain treatment within the medically acceptable 28-day wait time
  • Find out how long Canadians wait for joint replacement surgery, such as a knee or hip replacement

Quality of care

• Quality of care examines how safe and high quality health systems are, making sure that different areas of a health system meet patients’ needs by working well together
  • How many patients were readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of being discharged? What are the annual hospital costs of readmissions, and what are the population health factor risks of being readmitted?
  • Do you think that hospital deaths have increased or decreased in recent years?
  • While many mental illnesses can be treated by community care, patients with mental illness often have repeat hospital stays
  • Antipsychotics in long-term care are sometimes taken by residents who have not been diagnosed with a psychosis — find out about the potentially inappropriate use of antipsychotics in long-term care by province, year and city zone

Health system spending

• Health system spending provides information on both specific and overall health care costs
  • Explore how much Canada’s public health care systems cost on an age-adjusted public spending per person basis
  • Find out how much a standard hospital stay costs in Canada

Health promotion and disease prevention

• Health promotion and disease prevention looks at the promotion of good health and how well health systems help keep us from becoming ill.
  • Obesity is one of the two leading causes of illness and death
  • Review pertinent health data on whether or not programs that focus on anti-smoking work