Summary: The Canadian Health Care System

The Canadian health care system, although flawed, is privilege. There are only a number of countries that has a similar healthcare system where basic health care needs are covered by the government (i.e. France, Denmark, Germany, UK, etc.), the rest have a privatized health care system where an individual would have to pay for each visit and procedure depending on the amount their insurance covers (i.e. USA, Philippines, etc.).

If I was given the chance to change one thing about the Canadian health care system, that would be the allocation of health care practitioner to patient ratio. Currently, primary health care providers in Canada (i.e. General Practitioners) are sitting on 1:1000 that’s one primary practitioner to one thousand patients. Additionally, nurses have a set mandatory nurse-patient ratio depending on the level of care with an average of 1:2, while that number is acceptable, there are things to consider when allocating patients to nurses. Such as, the number of routine tests being done, the number medications to administer, charting, and following up with doctor’s orders. For example, a registered nurse in Emergency Room may be looking after 2 patients at a time but these two patients may have 5-10 different exams and medications on their orders that needs to be done and followed up on every 2 hours, which could result to burn out.
This would help reduce wait times, reduce patient dissatisfaction, increase quality of life, lower mortality rate, and above all increase life