Alexander Smith, HBA '13, is a Research Associate at the Ivey International Centre for Health Innovation. He also has an MSc and HBSc from Western University.
Many workers in health care would agree the health care system and its professionals will undergo massive transformations in the 21st century, which will most likely be characterized by disruptive change.
Alexander Smith’s blog discusses how current major health-care decisions lack vision, and fail to consider health-system transformations and new models of care. Instead, he points out how ‘change’ has become synonymous with ‘cost control,’ resulting in health-care cuts instead of health-care improvements.
“We know that significant changes are needed in Canadian health systems' funding and delivery models to make them sustainable and efficient,” Smith writes. “Yet despite this common knowledge, future system planning is almost always reserved to high-level strategic documents with little operational impact. We cannot separate future system planning from current health-system operations.”
