How Can We Improve Canada’s Public Health System?

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the issues within the Canadian public health system and suggest effective policy changes to address them. It will focus primarily on inequality and various shortcomings of the healthcare system that create and exacerbate health disparities. Through reviewing scholarly articles about the Canadian healthcare system, I found that it is built mainly for emergency physical care, but it does not efficiently treat chronic diseases or provide less urgent services such as dental care, nor does it consider the social determinants of health (SDOH). Much of the care citizens do receive is unnecessary or ineffective, and many people experience difficulty accessing care to begin with, especially rural and Indigenous Canadians. To improve Canada's public health system, lawmakers should implement policies that focus on increasing the effectiveness of spending, improving the comprehensiveness of care, and including SDOH to improve health equity, especially for Indigenous Canadians. I investigated strategies implemented in Canadian, foreign, and small-scale health systems to determine which methods work best to accomplish these goals. This is increasingly important as the prevalence of chronic diseases rises, especially in racialized and marginalized communities, and as the racial prejudices built into Canada’s socioeconomic system come to light in the current health and sociopolitical climate.