There is an analogy that Dean Jane Philpott keeps coming back to in her recently published book, Health for All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada. It’s one that many of the estimated 6.5 million Canadian adults without a family doctor might agree with: access to primary health care in Canada should be like access to public school in this country – guaranteed.
On the surface, it doesn’t seem like that bold a statement. After all, this is apparently the land of universal health care. But, of course, anyone who has been on a family doctor’s waitlist for years or had to visit an emergency room for a cold knows how dissimilar public school and primary care access can be.
It doesn’t have to be this way, stresses Dr. Philpott on a recent video call. And in her book, she sketches a vision not just for how to guarantee primary care access for everyone in Canada, but for how to fix an entire health system that has become, in her words, “broken.”
She clearly has the credentials to provide a potential cure. Before leading the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen’s, she was a family doctor and the federal health minister. But as she stresses on our call and in the book, it’s not like the solutions she presents for Canada’s cracked health system are a secret to policy wonks.
“We know what the answers are for how to solve this crisis,” she says. “But they aren’t well understood by the general public, who only seem to be getting a message of despair. So, I thought it’s about time I write them down.”
What she ended up writing down, however, wasn’t just health policy. It’s a bigger vision for how the country can be healthier, and it includes deep dives into the social determinants of health, the spiritual aspects of well-being, and how a healthier form of politics is needed now more than ever.
Infused throughout are sometimes deeply personal stories from Dr. Philpott’s life, including her decision to resign from federal cabinet during the SNC-Lavalin affair, the death of her first-born child, and her Christian faith.
She was nervous about including these more private details, she says, but now she is happy she did. “It’s amazing how many people say to me that they really loved those chapters about the personal story and the spiritual stuff – and people I would not have expected to hear from. So, it’s been a good validation that it was a helpful part of the whole picture.”
As for the next chapter in Dr. Philpott’s story, effective Dec. 1, she will be taking on a new role with the Ontario government, stepping down as dean of Queen’s Health Sciences to chair and lead a new primary-care action team.
As Dr. Philpott’s tenure at Queen’s comes to an end, she says her “big focus,” the thing she really wants to work on now, is helping ensure everyone has access to primary care.
“If we have the collective will,” she writes in Health for All, “we can build the way.”
Health for All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada is available from Penguin Random House Canada.