Alright, welcome to season five of Inside Mike Newhead. This is the Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible, awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among a sit-back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. Alright, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside Mike Newhead for our continued examination of the world according to simplification and preparedness. So thank you very much for all the great commentary back on season five intro and the first episode kind of outlining our view of simplification and why I think it's important that in as we advance our discussions about individual emergency preparedness, we start to put them in the context of real world issues that we're facing.
So I'll give you an example. This week's episode is all about health care and the problems with publicly delivered universal healthcare in Canada in the province of Ontario as I stand now in August of 2022. And the reason that matters is because in significant disruptions that occur that have some type of impact on the health and welfare of society, healthcare is one of those key critical infrastructure pillars that we all going to count on at one time to provide some type of care, some type of relief to us. For example, you know, if we have a significant tornado go through and you pick up the phone and you call 911, you believe that there should be something there to provide a response.
When your ambulance carrying your loved one comes flying into the ER at a Canadian hospital, you expect some type of intervention from some form of medically trained staff, right? If that disruption is not available, think of the level of preparedness medical training that you'll need to have to replicate, not replace, but replicate to the best extent possible that hospital or primary care. So today, we're going to talk about the three elements of health care, the three structural parts that make it up. We're going to talk about how they relate to preparedness and how we can do different things individually to better prepare or, you know, put ourselves in a good steed so that when these continue problems with healthcare occur, we're successful.
And then we're going to slide in there a couple of inside my canoe heads recommendations for how we turn around is healthcare, because let's not beat around the bush. Universal healthcare in the province of Ontario and across the country of Canada is collapsing, if not already collapsed. This is the reality we live in and no amount of money thrown at the problem will solve it. This is not a lack of funding problem.
This is not a lack of resource problem. So sit back, grab a beverage, let's talk healthcare. So yeah, as we talk about simplification, if you listen to the previous episode great, if you don't, I recommend going back, we talk about simplification. The goal here is to deconstruct what always seems to be this incredibly complex and multivariate stakeholder enabled cross departmental.
I mean, you can use all the buzzwords you want in the world. The delivery of universal healthcare is based upon the simple principle that people have access to care based upon need and that no monetary resources or connections, your social capital or your money cannot get you to the front of the line. That's basically universal healthcare. So healthcare is roughly broken down into three parts, right?
So let's talk to three parts. The first is primary care. Primary care in healthcare is you and your family doctor. The job of a primary healthcare is to keep you as healthy as possible and a robust gainfully employed contributing member of society who is fit, who is healthy, and has invariably suffering from no environmental related diseases.
So the idea requires that each Canadian and everybody in the province of Ontario has access to a primary care family physician who delivers them quality care, who they have a great relationship with, who they only need to see periodically, right? The idea of primary care is that if it's delivered properly and there's a positive reinforced relationship, then the doctor always gives great advice about how to live a healthy robust lifestyle. The patient agrees to that and follows the doctor's recommendation. And it goes back to the old adage that is around in a lot of papers that largely get ignored in the public, in the medical research field.
The patient's about, you know, we don't need more hospital beds. We need less demand for hospital beds. We need a robust fit and healthy population that periodically maybe only once every couple of years have to drop in to see their family physician. They don't have any acute needs that require them to go to the hospital.
There's very little environmentally related cancers and heart disease that exist because people are fit. They're robust. They have great heart health because they eat appropriate foods, etc. And this is part of the job of primary care to give that advice.
That's the part of simplification of primary. The problem that we have is that we don't have enough family physicians. There aren't enough doctors for everybody to have access to a medical doctor. And then when you try to get an appointment with them, it may be several days away, which forces everybody to use some other system to provide immediate medical relief.
And that is the difficulty that we face. So the solution to this is actually quite simple. We need enough family physicians so that everybody in Ontario has access to them. Can get an appointment within 48 hours, an appointment that is 20 minutes long, and that appointment can deal with multiple issues and deals with the whole of the person and is not on a fee for service model, which means we don't have codes into a payment system to the doctor.
If you could, if you set up that system, it's very, very simple. You set those parameters. You hire the appropriate number of doctors. You place them in the communities that are required and you give them the resources to execute that, right?
We're going to talk on a different episode later on about how to structure health care. In other words, to get rid of the ridiculous fee for service and professional medical corporation model that doctors use right now. But in the interim, this is primary care. So if we did that and we had the great advice, so now people are giving the advice.
People know exactly what they knew to live awesome, incredible, robust, healthy lifestyles. We're well into their 60s and 70s. They're not really don't need much of a need for a doctor. They're fit.
They're healthy. They're out. They're active. They're engaged in society, right?
Fantastic. So what is the enabler of that to the next stage? That's public health. Now public health is largely in today's world and the pandemic.
It's about their path and identity control, their responsibility to provide the advice to decision makers on how to control infectious disease in society. But they also have another excellent role. Public health is about educating people in the wider general community about how to be safe, how to be healthy. In other words, don't drink alcohol to excess.
Don't smoke tobacco, unless you're like me and you enjoy a cigar on the weekends. But the point being is that public health gives us that message, that evidence-based, medical-based message, and it keeps people healthy. It keeps public health inspectors out there in restaurants and places of work. And so public health is that amazing piece of the puzzle we have that gives us that collective viewpoint, that gives the advice, that ensures we do things safely in our collective environment.
And public health is also a big proclaimer. If you remember the old days of participation, when we used to see the commercial saying, the average 35-year-old Canadian is as fit as the 65-year-old Swede because they're out and they're active all the time, right? We used to have participation. You would see high schools and elementary schools where physical fitness was a daily class.
It was mandatory and kids sweat. They learned to move. They learned to exercise. They learned important nutritious.
I remember I had a mandatory class in grade 8. I had to learn how to cook. I had to pass tests on nutritional makeup of foods and how the body operates. And I had to bake muffins.
And I had to cook bacon. And I had to do these things to pass school. These are life skills. Like public health is all about reinforcing the knowledge of every Canadian needs to know how to read a label of a grocery item to determine whether this is appropriate healthy food for them and their family.
So this is an educational model more than anything. So put these two together. So imagine a society where all the relevant healthy information is available at a fingers touch to anybody who's looking for it. There's active public health campaigns out there teaching us all about the healthy way to lead our lifestyle.
There are free gyms for everybody who wants access to a public gym to get fit and to take get the use of a personal trainer. All that stuff is free. It's available to you to get fit a healthy lifestyle. We everybody has access to a primary care physician who they have a great relationship with and they're they're becoming healthy, right.
So what you see if you build that model and reinforce and support that model, you start to see a falling demand for hospital beds. It's not that hospital beds are closing because we don't have nurses. It's hospital beds are closing because nobody needs them because the population over a short period of time is transforming itself to a healthy robust population that, you know, in your mid 60s, you may take a couple aspirin once a day for arthritis, maybe, maybe not, but these these medicated ridiculous state of society today doesn't exist because people, if you reinforce these two structural elements of health care, right, then your third part acute is not overwhelmed and acute is the important stuff. That is the shizzy hits the fizzy.
You know, somebody drove T-bone your car, you're packed up, put into an ambulance and taken to a hospital. Right now the average weight for a paramedic in the city of Ottawa can be upwards of over 12 hours to get a patient offloaded to the system. Why is it that way? It's because the paramedics work for the city of Ottawa and the hospitals are individual corporations in Ontario and therefore it's under contract.
There is no way shape or form for the paramedics of Ottawa to force the hospital against their will to take the patient so that the paramedic can go back out into and recover more patients from injury and acute events seems around the city. So we have a code zero, which is where there are no paramedics available. It used to be 200 a year. We're now well over 500 already and we're already in August.
Like we're literally just a little over halfway through the year and we already had over 500 times in the city of Ottawa. Well, level zero was declared where no paramedics were available irrespective of the injury you have. Your spouse could be having a heart attack. There could be a major collision in one of our roadways and there simply were no paramedics available to respond.
The firefighters had to do the best they could to stabilize with the police officers and they could wait 30, 40 minutes at an accident scene for a paramedic to show up. That's the state of our health care system right now. So if you had a healthy population, if you didn't have people waiting in the emergency room because they didn't have access to a primary care physician within a reasonable short period of time, then you wouldn't have. Now, the acute side also includes your specialist, those incredibly well-trained individuals that provide very specific surgery.
Let's look at orthopedic surgeons who do knee and hip replacements. Now, I'm not going to throw it out there, but let's talk about it anyhow. How many of those knee and hip replacements are because people are obese because people are large and they're putting an untold wear on a human knee that was designed to support 140 to 180 pounds, but it's supporting 300 to 280 pounds. And of course, the knee goes and now it needs to be replaced.
If those individuals were fit and healthy and within a reasonable range of wait for their age, obesity would not exist. Right? Obesity has no requirements to exist in society whatsoever. But again, without good primary care, without great public health care, we have an endemic disease of obesity in our society that is driving a lot of these acute cases, right?
And so our hospitals, these acute care, which are private corporations under the law, are these centers that we expect to provide great care. Now, getting in there is very, very difficult at the emergency room. Getting in to see a specialist can have over a year wait load. Is that a question of non enough specialists?
So if it's a question of non enough specialist, then let's just triple the amount of orthopedic surgeons in the province of Ontario. Or you could look at it as why do people need orthopedic surgery now and a higher rate of prevalence than they did a long time ago when wait lists weren't that long. And when you look at the actual problem is is that people are living unhealthy lifestyles and therefore they're in a position where they need it because of that. Now, the people who actually have degenerative diseases that require them who are living healthy lifestyles are now having longer waits because of people who are living unhealthy lifestyles.
If you look at the acute, the acute care is there simply in a simplified model for those instances where things happen, the shizzi hits the fizzy, you get into an accident, you have a traumatic events, you had a heart attack or something along those lines, and they're there for you. But the society's need for it is far, far less when they're healthy and fit. So all of this a quick synopsis of the three parts of healthcare. How does this work out to be preparedness?
Well, you think about preparedness and healthcare, right? You need access. Why do you need access right now for healthcare? So think about look at the look at that incredible person in the mirror and the car mirrors are listening to me or at home and ask yourself, why would I need access to healthcare and how much of that need for access to healthcare is preventable is something that I can do now to change lifestyles.
And if you follow me on Instagram and TikTok, you know, I'm on a wait loss journey, right? My last three years of intense work in my PhD sit and you know being a podcaster through a pandemic, I've been sitting behind this computer right now and I gained 50 pounds that I probably should have, right? So I'm up to 230 pounds and I got to get down to 180. So any other physical ailments I'm having are self-inflicted because I permitted myself to get fat, right?
You can call yourself whatever you want. I look at myself in the mirror. I call myself fat. So I look at myself in the mirror saying, you know, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath.
I'm tired a lot, high stress, high anxiety. And then I look in the mirror and realize that a good portion of those things, sore knees, things along that line are actually due to the fact that I'm carrying around 50 extra pounds that I don't get enough sleep because I'm stressed. So I'm on a healthcare journey right now to de-stress my life and I'm on a healthcare journey to lose weight and get back to reasonable levels of fitness. You don't have to be crazy.
I'm 51 years old. So we work our way through this. So I'm doing the things from preparedness so that I place a less of a need on the healthcare system, right? So for my day-to-day operations as I get fitter, as I get healthier, as I become less and less stressed, I need less and less intervention from the healthcare system to live a healthy life, which reduces the probability that I will need and acute intervention by the healthcare.
And if everybody in the province of Ontario rapidly or it doesn't take, you know, I'm talking six months in a year, you can turn your life around, reduce their need for medical intervention and reduce their need to talk to a family physician, then it wouldn't be a problem. It wouldn't be a lack of doctors. It wouldn't be a lack of nurses. It wouldn't be a lack of healthcare system.
They'd all be standing around for a lack of patients because we would be fit and healthy as well. The second part of that is your skill sets when something happens. So remember, one of the animalistic requirements for a human in this world is called health and safety. And one of the health is is that you have to have an ability to deal with minor traumatic wounds that occur, right?
So things that occur to you, spraining an ankle, how do you deal with that? A twisted ankle, how do you deal with that? When you have heat exhaustion, heat stroke, when you have hypothermia, how do you deal with that? When you get a reasonably deep cut or gash in your skin, how do you heal and self heal that and close it up and do all that without requiring medical intervention?
How do you deal with stressful life experiences and anxiety without needing medical intervention? These are skill sets that you need to get better at. And I always offer the free model first. There's some great videos online on first aid, some are done by St.
John Ambulance, some are done by the Red Cross. There's a lot of preparedness channels on YouTube that have first aid related content to teach you a lot of things that you may need to know about how to deal with calamities. And if you can deal with these calamities and you get better at that, then again, you're helping to reduce the load on the healthcare system that is incredibly stressed right now. Because if you are able to both reduce your need to access it through gaining for living a more healthy and robust fit lifestyle, and then you have the skills to deal with minor issues as they occur, then really the healthcare system sits there for a regular checkup, which I'm 51 years old.
And I get blood work done every year just to make sure there isn't some weird funky thing going on in the inside of me. I see my doctor once a year. We sit down, we have a 10 minute conversation about life, the universe, and everything. I run a regular blood scan.
We compare it to last year's results. If he's concerned, he gives me a call. If he's not concerned, he doesn't call me and I carry on with life and everybody's happy. That's a great way to do it.
And then I am reducing demand on the acute, the need for specialists, the need for hospitalization, the need for surgery, the need for acute intervention in my life, freeing up demand for the hospitals to deal with those who do need acute intervention. So where can someone up is this, right? Health care really is not a complex issue. I don't care who you are, where you sit on the spectrum complex or you can believe it's complex, great.
There's huge health boards that'll tell you it's complex, detailed, integrated. I can go on and on about all those cool, stakeholder engagement buzzwords that I worked in the government for 30 years. All those are about, all those are about is building massive civilian public servant infrastructure that ensures tens of thousands of people get employed in the administration of health care. God forbid we removed 90% of those people.
We probably wouldn't see anything wrong with our change in our health care system other than the bill would get a lot smaller, right? Delivering health care at a universal setting is simple as having everybody having access to a primary care physician who is readily available and having a great relationship. People taking personal responsibility about choosing to live a robust healthy lifestyle both fit and eating properly. We have a wonderful public health care system where we get all the great information out to people.
We teach in the schools, we teach public, we keep our workplaces and where we, where we dine, where we gather, we keep them safe. Public health is an amazing, often it's I think it's the one pillar of the health care system that even prepand especially prepandemic never got enough funding, never got enough, enough support from the public about their role in society. So I really think public health care is really take the path and the genetic model aside to do with the pandemic and the polarization of public health care. Far too many blue check mark doctors have decided to become political advocates, they're abdicated their responsibility as physicians, but at this point there's nothing really we can do about it.
So if you then have those two squared away, top to bottom, left to right, everybody has access, everybody has all the information, everybody is encouraged to live a healthy lifestyle, then you have far, far, far less demand on your acute health care system. So when people need to be rolled up into a ambulance and taken to a hospital that there is no waiting time, they're immediately taken by the hospital staff, surgery time is immediately available when you need a hip and knee replacement because of a degenerative disease, not a lifestyle choice, but a degenerative disease you're in in a couple of weeks to get it done. That's possible, and that doesn't require any more money. If this is not a question of throwing money, and I will fight anybody who who who wants to advocate differently, and I firmly believe the public health care in the province of Ontario does not suffer from a lack of funding, it suffers from organizational paralysis, structural failure, all of that will review on an upcoming podcast.
So thank you very much. Please do me a favor. Listen, these episodes that I'm starting on simplification and taking issues like this and trying to wrap big things like health care collapse in the universal sense and your individual preparedness and how this works together. If this is a nod starter, if you think this is not going anywhere, then send me an email, tell me this through.
I got a couple of planned, I can swing fire onto something else that you think is more valuable at this time in our disruptive world. If this is not the exact kind of content that you're looking for, if it is, again, tell me the same thing. We'll wrap it up. We'll do more episodes.
So thank you very much. Leave your comments on what you think of my belief in the health care system and what you think of my simplification of health care. I'm sure a lot of you out there don't agree. And I'd look forward to hear of it.
In the meantime, take care of yourselves, go over and drop and see our website at triple w inside my canoe head.ca. Sign up for the newsletter. I'm starting to put some preparedness blogs up there. Stay tuned, stay safe, and we'll see you next time.