Room 1020
Diamond Health Care Centre
2775 Laurel St.
Vancouver, BC
20 Years of Health Reforms in Canada: The Experience of Seven Provinces
Health systems worldwide face a common policy challenge: how to deliver high quality care at affordable cost in an equitable way. However, despite persistent attempts at improvement, stasis appears pervasive in many systems. Over the last 25 years there has been in many cases a failure to adapt to emerging health needs and priorities within health systems in Canada. This provides a strong policy rationale to search for alternative strategies that might produce much-needed reforms. Within the natural laboratory Canada provides, our research team assessed both convergences and divergences in the strategies adopted in various provinces. Our interest in this research is to explore the transformative capacity of provincial health systems focusing on three questions: Where have provincial governments invested their reform efforts in the last 20 years? What strategies have they employed? What lessons can reformers draw from these experiences? This talk will provide an overview of this work and offer insight for the BC system.
