The SARS crisis revealed critical gaps in Ontario's health emergency response capacity, and identified, in the starkest terms possible, the need for improved emergency response planning. This article reviews the development of the Ontario Health Plan for an Influenza Pandemic (OHPIP), released in June 2005. Some key points arising from the provincial planning process include the necessity to: e...

OBJECTIVE Since 2003, the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission (formerly the Ministry of Health) has implemented changes to more effectively communicate risk during public health emergencies. In spite of ongoing improvements, provincial and sub-provincial leaders face barriers, such as established modes of operation, lack of training, shortage of trained risk communicators, an...

Singapore’s Medisave scheme has attracted widespread interest around the globe, due to its innovative ideas and the salesmanship of Singapore’s leaders (Kwa 1994; Nichols, Prescott, and Phua 1997; Phua 1997). While countries as different as the United States, South Africa, and China have adopted some of the core ideas of Medisave, its impacts have not been critically examined. The essay “Medica...

In recent years, many lower to middle income countries have looked to insurance as a means to protect their populations from medical impoverishment. In 2003, the Chinese government initiated the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS), a government-run voluntary insurance program for its rural population. The prevailing model of NCMS combines medical savings accounts with high-deductible catastro...

OBJECTIVE To obtain information from the members of the boards of devolved health care authorities on their motivations, attitudes and approaches, to evaluate their relative orientations to the expectations of provincial governments, local providers and community members, and to evaluate the influence of members' being employees in health care or social services and being willing to stand for e...

During the pre-Salk era, paralytic poliomyelitis was one of the most feared diseases of twentieth-century North America. This perception, held most strongly by the middle class-- polio's principal target--shaped a unique Canadian response to it based on comprehensive, standardized, and unconditional programs of "state medicine" at the provincial level. Of Canada's four major waves of provincial...

Immunization is a public health area in which the intergovernmental challenges of formulating a national policy are evident. It is also an area in which harmonization of policy across Canada is particularly critical. The National Immunization Strategy was a F/P/T initiative designed to achieve this policy goal. The combination of national guidelines and flexible federal funding via a trust has,...

BACKGROUND The use of mammography for screening asymptomatic women has increased dramatically in the past decade. This report describes the changes that have occurred in the use of bilateral mammography in British Columbia since the provincial breast cancer screening program began in 1988. METHODS Using province-wide databases from both the breast cancer screening program and the provincial h...