The future sounds great – so long as we can help people get there

“Technology, medicine, and health innovation is at our fingertips. We just need to make it all more available for all before it’s too late.”

I sat in on the 2023 Healthcare Summit hosted by the Economic Club of Canada this week and what a thought-provoking couple of hours it was. The day started off gloomy and dark - and by the time I left, it’s like the skies had parted and with it, a glorious beaming sun was shining down on Toronto.

The Summit kicked off with a question posed to the audience - once that’s been playing on repeat in my head.

The question: in two years time, where do we want to be as a country in the eyes of a patient? Easy one.

Alive.

With great innovation and prioritization, Canadians across the country are getting access to the care they need in order to manage a newly diagnosed cancer or rare disease. Access to care evidently a major topic at the Healthcare Summit, but so too was the critically urgent discussion around early detection, early care therapy, and of course, prevention.

The panelists varied from health advocates, to health professionals, and other industry leaders and what was most pressing was the urgent appeal to act swiftly to lower the number of cancer deaths to zero. Which still isn’t moving fast enough, as one doctor agreed.

In my own family, we’re faced with one of the biggest challenges we’ve ever had to encounter; my father was recently diagnosed with an incurable, inoperable cancer and the sheer mention of how many deaths this country will face this year had me shuttering in sheer terror and despair.

There are people behind the numbers. Lives. Hopes. Fears. Dreams. Families. The soundbites I share with you below are the most pertinent thoughts I took away from the Healthcare Summit.

I hope this inspire you to think about the changes you can drive in your own communities – starting with being a preventative advocate for yourself, your family members, friends, and people whom you know in your local areas. I’ve never had to hang around oncology wards before, but seeing as I’m now a frequent visitor of one, I can’t help but think about what we can do to keep more people out of them. Evidently, our medical system has reached a point where urgent innovation is unleashing potential for tomorrow. We can’t move fast enough for the people who have been given months to live. And good news, advancements in therapy and care are giving people a fair shot at dealing with the hands they’ve been dealt.

But this isn’t good enough. I for one like to control my health as much as possible. There are factors in the future unbeknownst to me that may play against my odds of staying as healthy as I am now. But this isn’t about me right now. This is about the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who, as you read this, aren’t sure what tomorrow will bring for them. And if they do have a hunch, aren’t feeling great about it.

If we can get stronger at pinpointing, earlier, what’s going on in someone’s body, the better off the health of our nation will be.  Self-advocacy and a self-believe to keep insisting on additional tests, scans, procedures are important, but why is it increasingly feeling like the responsibility lies solely on the shoulders of the patient? It shouldn’t. Curiosity on the part of General Practitioners (GP), is from my crystal-clear observation, the entry point to a time-sensitive care path that could and will save lives. Technology, medicine, and health innovation is at our fingertips. We just need to make it all more available for all before it’s too late.

Soundbites from the Healthcare Summit I want to pass along

On patient integrity: “Too many times, we say no because we’re too scared to do something good. Then the patient suffers.”

On fixing the system: “Stop studying. Start acting.”

On missed patient diagnoses: “It is true that great harm is being done to many people because of lack of awareness, and even sadly, callous indifference.”

On where we need to focus our undivided attention: “Sleep. Food. Movement. Income security.”

On driving immediate health outcomes and saving lives: “We should be incentivizing the best care in the public sector. Like we drive sustainable outcomes in the private sector.”

On patient trust: “We’ll only make the patient happy, healthy, trusting, if we truly understand and apply psychology, anthropology, and epistemology to whole care plans.”

On humanizing healthcare in Canada: “There’s a fear when technology continues to evolve that we’ll lose touch with people as whole people. People with families, hopes, dreams. More life to live.”

More life to live.

Let’s not just hope for it.

Let’s do every single thing we can to make it happen. And now.

A very special thank you to global health PR professional, and thought-leader whom I admire, Jill Yetman, for inviting me to the Healthcare Summit