Month: April 2021

By Sheryl Spithoff and Tara Kiran

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

The health care system’s pivot to virtual care during the pandemic has sparked a corporate stampede into primary care.

Every corporation – from telecom giants to technology startups – seems to want a piece of the pie. Just within the past year, Loblaw purchased a minority stake in a telemedicine platform and launched a health and wellness app that offers reward points at its grocery stores. The goal? To become the “front door of health care.”

Virtual care services are appealing – especially to the millions of Canadians who don’t have a family doctor or who struggle to get a timely appointment with the doctor they do have. Who doesn’t like the idea of chatting with a doctor in your pajamas or skipping the waiting room?

But this shift to corporate-driven care also has a dark side. We need to be wary of the consequences.

It creates a system that is driven by profit – one where care is designed to maximize revenue, not health outcomes, and where your health data is viewed as a financial asset. Instead, we need to find ways to improve access and incorporate new technologies in a primary care system that prioritizes patient health.

From the article in The Toronto Star:

…Farah Mawani, a social epidemiologist at Unity Health’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, said she hoped the order “encourages workplaces to put more measures in place to prevent closures.”

Workplaces must “receive any support they need to do that from the city and provincial levels so that they and workers are not bearing the burden of the closures,” she added.

But further, permanent measures are also necessary, said Mawani, who recently contributed to a report on global COVID-19 economic responses for the United Nations. Those measures include permanent, robust paid sick leave and income support accessible to even the most precarious workers.

Her recently published research shows high-income countries are the least likely to offer workers paid sick leave.

“It just breaks my heart to think that we haven’t protected workers adequately, including essential workers who are enabling all of us to live through this global crisis,” said Mawani.

“We are not adequately protecting at this stage, when their lives are in the most danger of all.”

From the Global News article:

…“Because vaccines are unfortunately so scarce right now, we have to be thoughtful… That means bringing the vaccines to the individuals, the communities, the locations, the settings where we have the most transmission, where we have the most risk, and therefore where we can have also the most benefit,” says Dr. Darrell Tan.

“We need to acknowledge that risk is not equally distributed in our population because of a whole host of structural, systemic inequities. And we need to respond to that.”

From the article in The Globe and Mail:

…There must be “a very clear, transparent connection to action, because communities can be harmed by just collecting this data, and then nothing happens,” said Andrew Pinto, a public-health specialist and family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

He suggested paid sick leave as a response, given the high rates of participation in essential jobs by the racialized groups who have had high rates of COVID-19. “We may start to have this information available, but … what do we do with it? And how can we ensure it’s tied to actions and that we are actually narrowing the gaps between different groups?”