A national grassroots organization, The Canadian Association for People-Centred Health, wants your vision and your strengths to be part of the country's healthcare equation!
Is our healthcare system resistant to change? For years now, the most news-worthy and politically-sparked issue amongst Canadians has been how to reshape their healthcare system to reflect the shifting demographic and societal landscape of the country. For years, politicians have played the healthcare card, dangling reform in front of Canadians only to withdraw it again once the heat of an election is off.
The members of a new organization, the Canadian Association for People-Centred Health (CAPCH) are thinkers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and ordinary citizens. Like all of us, they’ve had to wait for lab results, escorted family members to medical appointments, sat in overcrowded doctors’ offices and been often given only cursory medical advice or care… After surveying different groups that work within the system — professionals, industry representatives, academics and politicians — the CAPCH found that the unanimous agreement among all the groups was that our health system must become “people-centred” rather than system-centred.
This idea of people-centred healthcare can, the association believes, be built upon the strong and enviable system Canada already has in place. “People-centred” does not mean scrapping the entire system but rather it is a determined and conscious shift in the current paradigm. If we change our healthcare system from “illness” to “wellness” then the focus of care eventually evolves from constant crisis management to lifelong maintenance; from a bewildered to an informed patient; from disenfranchisement to empowerment.
People-centred healthcare involves every tier of patient care, from extended families to community workers to nurses and to doctors, and includes wholistic and other alternative incentives to health. As a not-for-profit association that welcomes members from all walks of life, the CAPCH reflects a wide sector of Canadians who want the kind of change that is centred upon the needs of individuals and is not motivated by political rhetoric, government mandates, or affiliations with any political party.
The CAPCH advocates more involvement by the average Canadian in their healthcare so that we all become the strategic architects of our own system, “a people-model” as the organization’s founder, Vaughan Glover, aptly puts it.