Last Tuesday, the Minister of Health and Social Services, Christian Dubé, presented his new dashboard that provides a quick and regular status report on the health and social services network. This witness to the consequences of the disease, or rather the lack of health in Quebec, constitutes a major advance in terms of transparency and the ability to monitor and analyze the needs of Quebecers with regard to care.
Posted yesterday at 3:00 p.m.
However, the dashboard also shows the underuse of public health and prevention for the achievement of targets, these two sections being under development. However, to turn most of the scoreboard indicators green in a context of limited resources, we must make sure to make a transition from our Ministry of Disease to a real Ministry of Health by placing prevention and health promotion at the heart of priority strategies.
Among the essential keys to achieving this, Bill 19, whose study and adoption seem destined to die on the order paper, is essential. The main objective of this is to enable more efficient and rapid use of network data, while protecting and involving the population in the collection and use of their health data.
This change would provide better data to measure the impact of our actions and thus make better informed and timely decisions.
With health care already accounting for almost 50% of government spending, and therefore a large proportion of taxpayers’ money, every dollar must be invested in the best way to ensure the viability of our public system. With better access to information, we can avoid blind governance and reduce the risk of investing in the wrong places or having to go back.
Some steps have been taken. Last year, access to data underwent significant changes with the adoption of bills 64 and 95 on data protection. However, there is still a colossal amount of work to be done, work that Bill 19, once studied and perfected, was to complete to allow the sharing and cross-referencing of data on disease as well as on quality of life and true health.
This bill, beneficial to all by supporting the best decisions and also allowing them to be judged, also receives good social acceptability: the population needs it to have better access to care when necessary and to have power over their health while the health care community, many socio-community organizations and researchers have been asking for it for several years.
This announced death of Bill 19 will push back by several months our collective ability to do better for our sustainable health and for the taxpayers’ wallets.
Consequently, we invite all political parties to include in their respective electoral platforms the essential issue of access to data so that it becomes a priority and is dealt with as soon as the next legislature opens.
We have already lost several years of effectiveness and efficiency: we no longer have the means. Let’s ensure that this bill 19 continues to evolve to become, when parliament returns, bill 1!