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

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

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