86% of Canadians are concerned about healthcare systems

86% of Canadians are concerned about healthcare systems

A new survey shows the majority of Canadians are concerned about the healthcare system, especially in Atlantic, where hospitals have struggled to maintain emergency services for months.

Leger and the Canadian Research Association surveyed 1,554 Canadian adults for two days in January. Doctors, nurses and patient advocacy groups have been sending insane red alerts about the crisis in Canadian hospitals since the start of COVID-19, when intensive care units and emergency rooms were flooded with patients. 

Since then, the already exhausted workforce has steadily declined, and the number of health workers to cope with flu and other respiratory diseases has decreased at the end of last year. About 86% of those surveyed nationwide said they were worried about their health care status, compared with 94% of those surveyed in Atlantic Canada.

Eastern Canadians are also worried about the quality of care they will receive when they have to go to the emergency room. Eighty-one percent said they were worried, while 67 percent of all Canadians said they were worried. Labor shortages in the area have repeatedly caused temporary emergency room closures, forcing patients to travel further for treatment they need urgently. 

In Nova Scotia, these closures occurred mainly in rural hospitals, a government report released late last year showed. Across the country, 90 percent of rural survey respondents reported concerns about health care. Overall, 54 percent of Canadians characterize the quality of their local health systems as good or very good, while 43 percent say they are bad or very bad. Canadians' assessment of the public health system is somewhat ambiguous compared to the answers of 1,005 Americans surveyed, 74% of whom said their healthcare system was good or very good.

While local and territorial governments are trying to overcome the surgical and diagnostic balances accumulated during the epidemic, some have turned to private hospitals to ease the burden. The move has sparked a polarised debate about the private provision of public health services. 

Fifty-three percent of Canadians surveyed said they did not want to see more privatisation in local healthcare systems. Sixty-nine percent of Canadians surveyed said their local governments were not putting enough money into the system, as the federal government is negotiating with provinces to pay a larger share of bills for health care.

Online surveys are not considered to be real random samples and therefore cannot be assigned a margin of error.

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