That's an excellent question.
I personally feel that our biggest danger with this largest nominal investment since 2003-04 is going back to solving the problems that were there yesterday when, in reality, they're very different today.
What's the number one problem in the health care system? It's the lack of interoperability. We don't know where our health assets are across the country. There isn't a map of where hospitals, clinics and other health access locations are. We don't know with any type of nuance what people do.
I've worked in Grande Prairie for 12 years. I would say the majority of HR in AHS has no idea what type of anaesthetics I provide, whether or not I can do small children or whether I can do adults with certain subspecialty areas.
The data that's going to drive it has to be more detailed and it has to be more focused on matching supply and demand. We also need to shift beyond these silo jurisdictions. When a person only accessed health care in the place where they lived, the jurisdictional approach worked fine, but now that patients are hypermobile across provinces and now that a lot of our care ends up happening in border towns.... Grande Prairie is only an hour and a half to two hours away from Fort St. John. We receive lots of patients there. There are examples of this across the country in every province and territory.
We have to evolve our way of looking at things beyond just jurisdiction. I will say that, for patients and providers, increasingly, the jurisdictional argument of why things are the way they are doesn't really hold any water, because we see the system burning down. Patients care less about whether or not the decisions are made in their province, and more about whether or not the decisions are effective.
Does that mean that we eliminate the role of provinces and territories? Absolutely not, but we need to be aware of the new climate that we're in and that we're solving the problems that are there right now.