Impact on Healthcare System
There’s been a lot of talk about what matters most to people in our healthcare system. We’ve heard a great deal about wait times, access to family physicians and emergency room backlogs. As citizens, we naturally worry about whether the system will be there for us when we need it.
What we haven’t heard much about is Complex Chronic Disease: the number one issue that lurks behind the rising demand for healthcare services and those longer wait times.
And it’s not just Bridgepoint Health who is saying this. Ray Hession of the Ontario Health Quality Council has said that “there is an elephant in the room that has gone essentially unnoticed and we ignore it at our peril: and that elephant is chronic disease”.
The facts are compelling.
- almost all of us will develop three or more chronic diseases during our lifetime
- 70% of Ontarians over age 45 already have two or more – Complex Chronic Disease • in the last decade, Canadian spending on publicly funded healthcare almost doubled, from $75 billion to $148 billion a year
- as much as 70% of that spending relates directly to chronic disease
- $80 billion a year – that’s the estimated cost of disability, illness and death due to chronic disease in Canada
The final sobering fact is that our healthcare system isn’t ready for, or geared to this new reality.
Our health care system wasn’t designed for this.
Today’s health care system was designed to save lives.
We have high-tech hospitals that operate very sophisticated emergency rooms, diagnostic centres with nuclear and digital technology, surgical suites supported by robotics, and critical care units that deal with our most complicated life challenges.
Over the last 50 years we designed and perfected a health care system that was completely focused on “saving lives”:
- Most of our doctors and clinicians became highly specialized
- Our scientists focused their efforts on advancing knowledge to save lives
- Most of our teaching was done in this “life saving” environment
- healthcare professionals and organizations worked in relative isolation from one another
We have come a very long way in the last 50 years of modern medicine. With this acute, episodic care model, our knowledge and our tool kits are so well advanced that today most people actually survive catastrophic illness or major body system failures and go on to live for long periods of time.
Odds are, these people have Complex Chronic Disease. And this is where our next challenge lies: our healthcare system was not been designed for them.
The challenge of Complex Chronic Disease
The disconnect between our current “life saving system” and this new generation of patients comes from the fact that unlike the last generation of patients, people with Complex Chronic Disease have a variety of needs and utilize many health services, over long periods of time.
So, while our current system and professionals work in silos, these people with Complex Chronic Disease need integrated care. While our healthcare professionals are really good at treating single diseases, these individuals need people and teams who understand multiple diseases. While we know a lot about what best medicine is for single diseases, we know very little about what it is for multiple diseases.
This calls for a new kind of healthcare and a new kind of healthcare professional.
It requires a system that doesn’t just treat illness but prevents and manages Complex Chronic Disease. Such a system would support individuals to live healthy lives, even with chronic disease…and will ensure that our healthcare system will be there for our children and grandchildren.