Danielle Martin (2)

When I noticed that Danielle Martin had written a book about the Canadian Medicare system, I wanted to read it. She is a young family physician who often appears as an expert on medical issues and I've been impressed with her analysis, practical approach and compassion for patients.
She presents six big ideas which she feels could dramatically improve Medicare in Canada without additional funds. She believes that there is enough financial support, but we need to adopt more efficient practices and use data more effectively.
The six big ideas:
1. Patient relationship: cultivating relationship based patient care
2. Pharmacare: establishing a national prescription drug program
3. The compulsion to cure: reducing or eliminating unnecessary tests or procedures
4. Doing more with less: reorganizing our existing resources to improve care
5. Basic income for basic health: ensuring a basic income to improve health
6. The anatomy of change: building the systems we need to actually implement change instead of just talking about it.
When you read some of her examples and her solutions you have to wonder why they have not been adopted across the board. The whole idea of collecting patient data to analyze demographics and diseases in order improve outcomes is a no brainer. Improving the communications and relationship between hospitals and family doctors would be helpful. She uses the example of a patient who died after being admitted to the ER and her office was not notified. When her office called for a reminder appointment, they were surprised to find out she had died.
Her case for a national pharmacare program makes sense as it would establish a national database of patients and drugs, allowing for monitoring, reduction of duplicate prescriptions, and allowing the working poor to access better health care when they can't pay for their drugs.New Zealand is shown as the best practice for this program
Read this book and you will be surprised at how some of these relatively simple ideas, if put into practice could improve the health and dignity of Canadians. Change management and management of expectations are important themes.… (lisätietoja)