Health care is certainly a 'hot button' issue in Canada, and has been for years.
It's not surprising since most people's experience with the health care system revolves around circumstances in their lives which can be life threatening in terms of injury, or disease.
We can look at provincial budgets and see that our health care system is a major cost, taking up the lion's share of spending, so we have an expectation that everything will be perfect within the system.
But few things the scale of health care, with the diversity of service it must provide, are ever going to be perfect no matter how much public money is invested.
So there are continual issues popping up in terms of service in health care.
We have seen that with ongoing concerns over shortages of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. Those concerns led to a local committee being struck in Yorkton to look for ways to help the situation, and provincially more university training seats have been established to help the situation in the years ahead.
Now in the Sunrise Health region a new concern has surfaced.
The Fifth Estate, a long-running, and well-respected news magazine show on CBC television produced a report card on health facilities across Canada. The results, released last week, were not good for the hospital in Yorkton, which was one of only eight in the country getting the lowest 'D' rating.
The report used creditable data as its basis drawing on publicly available information from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
But as Sunrise Regional Health Authority Board Chair Lawrence Chomos pointed out when interviewed Friday by Yorkton This Week, how a grade was assigned based on the CIHI information is unclear.
And therein lies a concern.
Media has a responsibility to report issues in health care. When the result of botched x-rays in Yorkton came into question, it was justifiably front page news in this publication.
But making headlines is a different thing.
The CBC can provide expert analysis on CIHI without imposing an unquantifiable grade on each hospital. Such grades send a message that may well be misleading.
As Chomos pointed out there were reports last week of patients in Ontario canceling elective surgery in lower graded hospitals in hopes of getting on the list where higher scores were achieved.
In an already busy system that adds new pressures.
The poor Yorkton grade is also hard to understand based on recent results.
It was only last December when it was announced Sunrise Health Region had among the lowest Hospital Standardized Mortality Ratio (HSMR) rates in the country.
The CIHI report, released Dec 13, studied the number of deaths in hospitals across Canada including all hospitals in the Sunrise Health Region.
CIHI standardized the data it collected adjusting for several factors which may affect in-hospital death rates such as age, sex, diagnoses and admission status.
A mortality ratio of 100 is the Canadian average.
A ratio of less than 100 indicates results better than the national average. The HSMR of 74 for Sunrise Health Region was among the lowest in the country.
The Health Centre also recently went through its Accreditation Canada Survey process, and the results showed significant improvement from the same process three years ago.
"We've had a 50 per cent improvement," said Suann Laurent, president and CEO of the SHR at the time of the report, adding that is an indication of how much work has been done over the last three years "to meet all the criteria of national excellence."
Laurent said of the "1769 criteria to be met" only 10 per cent were "not met in our region."
But as Chomos noted of the CBC report it is more data for the local administration to filter in determining how to better serve the local public.
And in that respect every nudge toward better health care is a good one.
