Health Reform Requires Policy Capacity
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Lawrence D. Brown; Pierre-Gerlier Forest; Jean-Louis Denis; W. David Helms
- Source
- International Journal of Health Policy and Management, Vol 4, Iss 5, Pp 265-266 (2015)
- Subject
- Health Politics
Health (social science)
Capacity Building
Quality Assurance, Health Care
Leadership and Management
Health Personnel
Advisory Committees
Public policy
Health Care Sector
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Public administration
Public Action
Health Reform
Health Information Management
Economics
Humans
Policy Making
Evidence
Social Responsibility
Public Sector
business.industry
Health Policy
lcsh:Public aspects of medicine
Public sector
Capacity building
lcsh:RA1-1270
Public relations
Policy Capacity
Private sector
Policy analysis
Policy studies
Leadership
Health Care Reform
Commentary
Private Sector
Health care reform
Public Health
business
Social responsibility
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 2322-5939
Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acute care to prevention and chronic disease management the consensus is that Canada has been unsuccessful in achieving a major transformation of our 14 health systems (one for each province and territory plus the federal government). I argue that 3 additional things are essential to build health policy capacity in a healthcare federation such as Canada: (a) A means of "policy governance" that would promote an approach to cooperative federalism in the health arena; (b) The ability to overcome the "policy inertia" resulting from how Canadian Medicare was implemented and subsequently interpreted; and (c) The ability to entertain a long-range thinking and planning horizon. My assessment indicates that Canada falls short on each of these items, and the prospects for achieving them are not bright. However, hope springs eternal and it will be interesting to see if the July, 2015 report of the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation manages to galvanize national attention and stimulate concerted action.