Factsheets and Backgrounders

Continuing care – the suite of services comprising long-term care, home care, respite care and palliative care is in need of serious reform across Canada. Insufficient funding, lack of access, lack of planning, including lack of discharge planning, poor quality, unsafe staffing and a patchwork of care regulations and standards across the country have led to a crisis for Canadians in need of continuing care. The implications impinge on the acute care system, creating backlogs and inappropriate care settings, thereby compromising the quality of care for patients and the efficiency of the system as a whole.

Is Canada’s health care system sustainable? Critics of medicare point to increases in health spending as the harbinger of financial disaster. And they have a simple, seductive answer ready at hand — let the market fix health care. Both suggestions — that there is a crisis of sustainability, and that the market can fix it — are false. The critics have overstated their case. Canada’s health spending is increasing but stable, and in line with other comparable economies. The effect of our aging demographic is minor and slow-moving, while cost drivers with greater impacts, like prescription drugs and the use of technology, can be controlled.

Pharmacare is a proposal for a national publicly funded and administered insurance plan for medications.

This factsheet provides an overview on the state of the nursing workforce.

Nurses are the largest group of regulated health professionals in Canada. As of 2009, there were 266,341 registered nurses (RNs), 76,944 licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and 5,214 registered psychiatric nurses (RPNs) working as nurses in Canada. (Note: RPNs are regulated as a separate profession in the four western provinces and Yukon only.) In all there are 348,499 regulated nurses working as nurses in Canada.