Health Care Swot Analysis

The SWOT analysis is a useful and time-tested leadership tool to assess a system's Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats to find areas of vulnerability that needs improvement or development. (Blayney 2008)

A strength of Canadian healthcare system that comes to mind is the government run health insurance system that provides comprehensive coverage, universality, portability, and accessibility to patients. (Canada 2010) With its public administration of healthcare that is funded with tax revenue, no Canadians is deny access to care because of pre-existing conditions. This allows comprehensive care to be provided to patients without saddling them with financial bills that would ruin their lives. In short, Canadians never worry about

incurring health care expenses. The single payer system (via portable provincial health system) for primary care, which covers most of the basic healthcare needs of Canadians, and reduce the higher administrative cost associated with billing different health insurance company, is also another strength. (Ridic, Gleason, and Ridic 2012) The billing is straightforward and electronic with 95% of the requested reimbursement completed. (Government 2018) Another strength of the Canadian healthcare system is the control of medical care costs by paying physicians negotiated fee for service payment and by giving hospitals global budget payment. (Ridic, Gleason, and Ridic 2012) In doing this, medical care cost is reduced by reducing/eliminating bonus payment to administrative staffs and by eliminating the potential for corruptions associated with a white elephant project that hospitals may embark on.

The weakness in Canada healthcare system is the wait time patients experience because of scarcity of healthcare providers.

Compare to the United States, Canadians have few physicians per 10, 000 population (19 vs 27). (Guyatt et al. 2007) Consequently, less specialists are available to provide tailored care to patients that needs it the most. More so, because of the limited number of specialist, studies have found Canada to be deficits in several areas including angioplasty, cardiac catheterization, and intensive care. (Ridic, Gleason, and Ridic 2012, Guyatt et al. 2007) Waiting list for certain surgical and diagnostic procedures are common in Canada and the treatment (such as hip replacement, cataract surgery and cardiovascular surgery) delay for the elders is a problem. (Ridic, Gleason, and Ridic 2012, Guyatt et al. 2007) The poor patent protection, mandatory low prices, and variability in regulation of pharmaceuticals between different provinces is another glare weakness in Canada healthcare system. (Ref) Such an approach hinders entrepreneur incentives for robust research into generating newer drugs and

medication.

The analysis of weakness often informs identification of opportunities.

To significantly reduce the waiting list/ wait time, more Canada trained physicians are needed. Currently, there only 17 medical schools in Canada compare to 172 (and counting) medical schools in the United States. The low number of medical schools in Canada means there would be less physician to care for the increasing number of aging population in the future. Consequently, the waiting list/ wait time problem would not be solved even if primary care activities are contracted to other health care providers like nurse practitioners. Also, with low number of physicians graduating from the Canada medical schools, the number of trained specialist would still be low, which would not improve the delay older Canadians expect to obtain from specialist. Another opportunity is to increase patent protection and streamline the regulation of pharmaceuticals between the ten provincial authorities. This would not only boost incentives for innovations, it would increase the number of new clinical trials for new

drugs.

The threat to the Canadian health care system may come from few medical schools producing the few physicians for the increasing aging population and the long wait time to gain access to specialized care. For example, Canadian Shona Holmes, was diagnosed with Rathke's cleft cyst on pituitary gland, a benign cyst in her brain. In Canada, after her diagnosis, she would have to wait for six months to see a specialist (neurologist) before she could undergo surgery without copay and no deductible. However, she opted to get the cyst remove as soon as possible at a cost of $97,000 at Mayo clinic in the U.S. Her diagnosis and surgery was done within four weeks. (Hardymon 2009)