Health Care Report Card

Tomorrow, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) will be releasing their fifth annual report card on the status of our health care system. The report will take an indepth look at patient safety, from a number of perspectives, using idicators such as, post-operative hip fractures, birth trauma and foreign objects left in the body after a procedue. The report also presents measures of health care professionals from 78 regions across Canada. The CIHI was spawned in the mid-90s by the federal and provincial governments, to be an independent, not-for-profit organization, that would work improve the health care system for Canadians. The organization is funded by the governments, and therefore reports to the governments. This fifth annual report will most likely be using a lot of data collected by Statistics Canada and Health Canada -- as the organization has inherited some health care related information management functions from those agencies. The CIHI isn't the only publisher of health related reports for public consumption -- Statistics Canada has also in the past, put out reports (check out their 2003 report: How healthy are Canadians? [PDF])