CEO uses cookie to avoid speaking to reporters
This week’s equivalent of “Don’t touch my junk” just might be “I’m eating my cookie.”
That was the response given by Dr. Stephen Duckett, the then-CEO of Alberta Health Services, to reporters who were asking him about problems with Canada’s health care system.
Duckett was leaving a meeting on Nov. 19 about fixing the health care system when reporters asked what he thought about criticism of Alberta Health Services.
When asked why he won’t stop and talk, he exclaims, “I’m still eating my cookie!”
The reporters offered to wait until he finished his cookie so he could comment but he instead responded with apparent irritation that “the media are not prepared to go to the media scrum,” a scheduled event that was scheduled to take place about 30 minutes after this confrontation.
Duckett has since been fired and three board members have quit in the wake of his dismissal.
Canadians fight for disclosure of medical treatment
It took eight years, a whistleblower and intervention from a state commissioner to uncover a fatal medical error in a Newfoundland hospital, one committed by a doctor with an (undisclosed) record of such actions. As Canadian broadcaster CTV reports, Canada’s free access to health care doesn’t translate to free access to information.
Here’s my summary of the story’s key events, as I understand them:
- A woman in Newfoundland dies soon after her ER doctor misdiagnosed a blood clot in her lung and gave her treatment that a colleague said would have been equivalent to a “lethal injection.”
- The victim’s family doesn’t know that anything was out of the ordinary until six years later, when the colleague contacted the family directly to explain what he believed to be a mistake.
- The family approaches the hospital for information, and gets a few treatment records, but is denied access to records from an internal investigation of the incident.
- Using the province’s FOI laws, the family again pushes for the investigation information. Their request is denied.
- Finally, “the family appealed to the province’s Information Commissioner, who ordered Eastern Health to hand over the records.”
- A year later, the records were disclosed – but key EKG information was not. Thus, the family’s fight for disclosure continues unabated.
Canadian government obstructs journalists’ access
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records
Writing in Nature News, Kathryn O’Hara celebrates Right to Know Week by declaring that “the information policies of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper are muzzling scientists in their dealings with the media.” She paints a picture that should be painfully familiar to those who deal with American federal agencies or have followed the recent work of AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee.
Margaret Munro, a science reporter for PostmediaNews, has uncovered that a policy enacted in March stipulates that all federal scientists must get pre-approval from their minister’s office before speaking to journalists who represent national or international media. The pre-approval process requires time-consuming drafting of questions and answers, scrutinized by as many as seven people, before a scientist can be given the go-ahead by the minister’s staff. This is to spare the minister ‘any surprises’.
O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, provides some distressing examples, including the systematic burying of climate change research and the odd case of a report on a 13,000-year-old flood that broke outside of Canada, because Canadian journalists didn’t have access to the sources.
Scientists in departments that deal with natural resources, health, fisheries and oceans have also felt the pinch of the muzzle. Consequently, Canadians learn little about the results of their wider government science, at least first-hand. Media clearance can take four or five days — ridiculous in a 24/7 news world. And because of the delays, research led by Canadian scientists is regularly channelled through international collaborators and released through their agencies.
All this message micromanagement is even more remarkable, O’Hara writes, given Harper’s past pledges to maintain a transparent government, and to get Canadians excited about science. Canadian journalists are calling for better access to federal researchers, a position that echoes that of AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee and other American journalism groups.
The Canadian Science Writers’ Association in Toronto is asking for timely access to federal scientists whose research is published in journals or presented at conferences open to the media. Our journalists need to speak with scientists to avoid misinterpretation of research. And, as journalists around the world will testify, scientists usually avoid politics and steer clear of policy-sensitive discussions. Canada’s researchers are no different.
Tracking Canada’s asbestos funding
Fallout from Dangers in the Dust, the mammoth asbestos investigation by the BBC and the Center for Public Integrity/International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, continues. On the ICIJ Global Muckracker blog, Jim Morris details the Canadian Public Health Association’s ongoing effort to detail the financial relationship between a powerful Quebec asbestos lobby and Canada’s Ministry of Natural Resources.
The CPHA’s policy director, James Chauvin, told ICIJ that the institute was “polite” in its responses to inquiries and did send “a pile of technical manuals.” But the manuals shed no light on how C$20 million in federal funds has been spent over the past quarter-century, Chauvin said, and the information wasn’t available on the ministry’s website.
The lobbyists, Montreal’s Chrysotile Institute, have earned Canada the title of “primary booster” of the global asbestos trade. The institute receives both government and industry funds, though the numbers are still fuzzy for both.
If you’ve somehow missed Dangers in the Dust thus far, head over immediately. The infographics alone are worth the price of admission. At the very least, read Brenda Wilson’s summary on the NPR health blog.
List reveals drugs U.S. consumers buy from Canada
On the Los Angeles Times‘ Booster Shots blog, Jeannine Stein has located the Canadian International Pharmacy Association’s list of the top drugs purchased online by American customers in 2010.
The list swings heavily toward treatments for chronic conditions, with Plavix, Advair and Flomax topping the list. As Stein notes, international and online prescriptions are in dubious legal territory, but it’s right in Wikipedia’s wheelhouse and the site can point you to the relevant laws.
By the way, the Canadian International Pharmacy Association is an association of retail pharmacies that sell pharmaceuticals and maintenance medications in 90-day quantities to Canadian and U.S. citizens. The group might be a good source if you are writing about people in the United States buying drugs in Canada. The organization is certainly tracking news coverage of the topic.
Blog tracks Canadian health policy reports
Canadian journalist Carl Meyer has turned reportscanada.ca into a one-stop clearinghouse of policy reports from the Canadian government and non-governmental policy organizations.
The site, a model that journalists around the world could follow, is a deceptively simple site built on a modified Google Blogger platform. All health-related posts are conveniently aggregated here. In a bare-bones style that focuses on keeping things basic and easy to sort, Meyer has cataloged 388 reports since he launched the site in April of 2009.
It’s a brilliant example of how a blog can be turned into a database, and Meyer even takes advantage of the format to generate a nifty Google Map of all his entries. The maps can also be broken down on a city-by-city basis.
Open access to research recognized this week
Filed under: Health journalism, Public records, Studies, Tools
It’s Open Access week! Time to honor the principle that scientific research should be made available for free online immediately upon publication, a principle that’s served health journalists pretty well over the past few years. Universities, government organizations and other groups around the world will celebrate by opening up more information and drawing attention to the principles that drive the open access movement.
Open Access flagship reaches milestone
On Oct. 19, PLoS Medicine, 
a prominent and pioneering open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science, turned five. The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit funded by charging authors publication fees, and by private donors. In addition to PLoS Medicine, it publishes six other journals covering biology and medical science.
PubMed goes Canadian
One of the greatest triumphs of open access has been PubMed Central, in which all NIH-funded research is made available for free, usually within 12 months of publication. Both the U.S. and U.K. have their own PubMed systems, and now Canada’s getting one too. PubMed Central Canada, created by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, and the U.S. National Library of Medicine, will take its first steps, launching its manuscript submission system as part of the week’s festivities.
Polls, studies used to compare U.S., Canada care
Filed under: Health care reform, Health data, Hot Health Headline
The Associated Press’ Charmaine Noronha takes another look at the Canadian health care system, focusing on the debate over its effectiveness and on Canadians’ relative satisfaction with their care. Noronha relied on a number of polls and studies to help inform the discussion, including per-capita cost numbers.
Canada’s system provides its citizens with coverage at a much lower per capita cost than the U.S. largely because its single-payer system, in which the government picks up the tab, greatly reduces administrative costs.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, per-capita spending for health care in the U.S. was $6,714 in 2006; in Canada, $3,678. The U.S. spent 16 percent of its GDP on health care that year; Canada spent 10 percent.
Canada takes Monsanto, Dow’s word on safety
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Hot Health Headline
Martin Mittelstaedt of the Toronto Globe and Mail looks into the Canadian government’s approval of “one of the most complicated genetically engineered plants ever designed,” a strain of feed corn stuffed with eight different sets of foreign genes.
The super-corn will resist numerous common pests as well as the popular herbicide Roundup. The problem, Mittlestaedt reports, is that Canadian health agencies never assessed the new plant’s safety and instead relied on the plant’s developers to make sure it was safe.
The health agency said in response to questions from The Globe and Mail that it didn’t have to do so, because it is relying on the two companies making the seeds, agriculture giants Monsanto Co. and Dow AgroSciences LLC, to flag any safety concerns. But the companies haven’t tested the seeds either, because they say they aren’t required to.
Monsanto and Dow have, however, tested each of the eight characteristics individually, a precaution which some experts say doesn’t go far enough and may not detect allergens or other dangerous consequences of mixing so many traits in one place. Likewise, Mittlestaedt says that UN food safety guidelines recommend that the foreign genes be tested in combination as well as independently.
(Hat tip to Andrew Schnieder on Cold Truth)
Why Canada’s system does and doesn’t work
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times explored Canada’s universal health care system, seeking to dispel rumors and misconceptions and explain the good (cheap, efficient) and bad (waiting lists) of a much-debated but rarely explained system. Each Canadian province has its own system, and rates are set through negotiations between medical organizations and local physicians.
The example of Dr. Diane Normandin, in particular, showed the stark contrast in efficiency between the American system and the Canadian one.
She moved to Clearwater, Fla., in 1994 because she thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. But she spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tell whether a patient’s insurance covered visits to a particular lab or specialist.
“You had maybe five minutes with the patient but 20 minutes of paperwork and the ridiculous sorting out of where the patient could go,” said Normandin, who needed six employees to handle the workload. “It was crazy.”
She returned to Canada in 2003 and opened a family practice near Montreal. She now has one employee.
Taylor Martin also tackles the word “socialist” and explains the other factors that go into Canada’s much-maligned waiting lists, as well as attempts being made to decrease those delays.
A sidebar focuses on a Canadian cardiologist who joined a practice in Orlando, Fla., because he thought U.S. doctors had more freedom. He also eventually returned to Canada and is now critical of the U.S. system. Among his criticisms: “He found that American doctors tend to order more testing, partly for fear of being sued but also because ‘patients demand it and doctors and hospitals want to do it because it’s more money.’”
Other stories in the project:
- Part Three: Canada keeps malpractice cost in check
(Hat tip to Investigate West)
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