The Pandemic Forced Canada's Health System to Change. Can Continued Innovation Mark our Road to Recovery?

After having weathered a second winter of COVID-related restrictions, the arrival of spring in Canada has prompted the loosening of many of the health and safety mandates deemed so necessary, over the past two years. Through that long and difficult period, as the pandemic gathered momentum, our healthcare system and the incredibly brave caregivers who work within it, were, with each successive COVID wave, tested, and – in many cases – pushed to their breaking points.

Through those darkest days, governments at every level scrambled, stretched, collaborated, and implemented solutions that months earlier would have been thought impossible. While these Herculean efforts, including such measures as wage and rent subsidies, business loans, and not-for-profit grants, cushioned some of the impacts Canadians endured, our healthcare system continued to stagger under the ongoing weight of this country’s pandemic response, with long-existing deficiencies across the continuum of care now fully exposed.

Over the last two years, we bore witness to a pandemic that forced medical specialists out of their offices, doing the best they could to manage online versions of care provision. We heard the laments of patients, fearful they may not receive timely diagnoses, or angry at having long-scheduled procedures and surgeries put on hold indefinitely. Discussions are now focused on recognizing the potential for missed diagnoses and slowdowns in primary care delivery to lead to more complex medical requirements, as our systems struggle to return to normal capacity.

The ongoing focus of healthcare professionals had been on treating COVID patients – many of whom required immediate urgent or intensive care. However, in a classic case of being trapped between a rock and a hard place, our necessary focus on COVID patient care led to a growing awareness of a negative ‘ripple effect’ across increasingly wide-ranging areas of medical need. Data published in December 2021 by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) noted that through the first three COVID waves (March 2020 to June 2021) almost 560,000 fewer surgeries were performed, due to cancellations and delays, when compared to pre-pandemic levels of care.

Backlog estimates do, without a doubt, paint a disheartening picture, but meeting the challenges they present is also an opportunity to improve our health systems for the future. It’s time for healthcare policymakers, hospital administrators, and politicians to take the action required to combat the effects this pandemic has had on Canadians.

A new willingness to consider available options and adopt physician and patient-centred innovative solutions to deliver care could include:

• Separating elective and urgent/emergency treatments, both physically and organizationally, into two streams, as some Canadian health centers have already started doing.
• Protecting this dedicated separation of treatments to address the surge of wait-listed patients and those who will now seek care after waiting these last months.
• Operating each stream with unparalleled efficiency, with the advantage of increased predictability and planning, and using data-driven analytical tools and process support. Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s Surgical Process Institute solution is one example that provides that support.  
• Supporting our healthcare workforce to perform at their best. This may include implementing programs to optimize efficiency, engagement, and resilience, but should also include the adoption of strategies that can quickly place new workers into our overburdened system. Identifying and addressing outdated divisions of labour, and making bold moves designed to allow internationally certified caregivers to complement our existing teams of healthcare professionals, are two obvious examples.

Putting these kinds of innovative options in place would power the ability of our medical experts to ramp up efficiencies in ways we haven’t achieved before, as well as protect the system from future waves of COVID or other crises that will otherwise hold the delivery of acute care hostage.

While many of the challenges we face in the wake of COVID are daunting, I believe there are many reasons to be optimistic. First, the speed at which government leaders and our healthcare system rallied to meet previously unthinkable challenges, put Canada in a leadership position, responding to and mitigating the impact of this pandemic. Secondly, the unprecedented need for collaborative approaches fuelled a new mindset that broke down traditional barriers and allowed diverse teams with unique and complementary capabilities to work together to tackle big challenges. We need to ensure we hold on to this new model of thinking, as we tackle, for example, the spectre of nearly one million deferred surgical procedures, which now exist in this country. With the right partnership mindset, government, academics, and the private sector can all bring specialized expertise to the table, enabling the creation of bold new approaches designed to manage the backlog, future-proof our system against crises yet to come, and ultimately, evolve our health system for the better.