NIAGARA FALLS, Ont. — Canadians have no way of judging whether the health-care system is providing good value for their tax dollars because of a lack of solid information to assess its performance, Canada’s auditor general says.
Sheila Fraser said Ottawa and the provincial and territorial governments need better reporting of health-related data if the system is to meet the future needs of Canadians.
Fraser said governments also need to focus their crystal balls farther into the future and produce long-term projections critical for planning health services that will be needed by Canada’s aging population.
“This information will help government, at all levels, improve health-care planning as well as increase accountability for the use of health-care dollars,” she said.
“There’s certainly improvement that is needed in reporting to Canadians on how effective their health-care systems are,” Fraser said at a press conference. “We don’t know if we’re getting good value for money.”
The auditor general said an assessment by her office of federal transfer payments to the provinces found that in most cases there were no conditions surrounding how the money was used.
“So even if the public announcement is that the money is going, for example, to medical equipment or to health care or to increase the number of police officers, there is no actual condition in those agreements requiring the provinces to spend the money that particular way.”
“But it means at the end of the day that they don’t know, the federal Parliament has no assurance, as to how the money is being spent, except to rely on the provincial governments, and then of course to look at what the provincial financial statements would be saying.
“So there is a bit of a disconnect as to how some of these transfers are being presented and the actual conditions.”
Fraser said an audit of Canada Health Infoway, the body charged with promoting the implementation of electronic health reporting across the country, shows it has a good system in place and does rigorous assessment of projects before agreeing to fund them.