“Un-lump us,” was the resounding cry from roughly 50 Sunshine Coasters who attended the sixth Democracy Talk with Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Liberal candidate for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country, and guests, Dr. John Millar and Dr. Allan Best, on May 9.
Titled Hope for Health Care, the talk presented an opportunity for locals to voice their concerns over the current health care system. Out of several problems, the one that got the most attention was the issue of Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) grouping medical data from West Vancouver in with data from the Sunshine Coast.
“In general, we’re not doing as well as West Van[couver],” Dr. Paul Martiquet said from the audience. Martiquet is a medical health officer for VCH.
“By income, employment and education, we simply cannot match what is going on in West Van,” he continued. “In fact, West Van is kind of disappointed because Maclean’s [magazine] used to rank their community number one in terms of health status in Canada. Now that they’re lumped in with us, they’ve gone way down.”
“I love the sentiment from everyone, ‘un-lump us.’” Goldsmith-Jones, a former mayor of West Vancouver, said in response to the audience. “Because I think that communities know themselves best.”
Both doctors agreed that one of the underlying problems in our health care system is a lack of communication between federal, provincial and local governments. Millar introduced a triple aim approach that directs the advancement of the health care system.
“First of all it’s improving the overall health of the whole population and reducing some of the inequities. The second thing is improving the care that patients get — improving the patient’s experience of care, and improving the effectiveness of care,” Millar said.
“The third thing is controlling health care costs. As we all know, in the last couple of decades, health care costs have been creeping up and up and up to now consume almost 50 per cent of the provincial budget.”
Best added to this, saying that the research into health care being done at universities in Canada is good, but it’s not enough. What is lacking, in his opinion, is local feedback to national medical issues.
“You really need the researchers and users working together much more collaboratively from the get go,” Best said. “It’s something to think about for a local community in terms of how you are going to get the kind of research that’s going to be useful to you happening in this community.”
In terms of realizing a more communicative health care system, Goldsmith-Jones offered her views on what that would mean for the federal government.
“With regard to the federal government’s role in health, you have to have freedom of speech, you have to have a long form census, you have to respect scientists — obviously — and you have to understand that a federal government means: the federal, the provincial and the local levels of government work together. It is not rocket science.”
Democracy Talks is an ongoing series hosted by Goldsmith-Jones aimed at bringing members of the local riding together to discuss issues that are relevant at the local level and important at the federal level.
