- people can no longer admire my legs during my morning walks -- it's now too cold to wear shorts
- kids are back at school and you begin to notice the unmarked police cars around the various school zones
- you suddenly get rattled out of your chair the Tuesday following the closing of the CNE, as the Snowbirds do a low-level fly-by in the Durham Region
There were huge celebrations and welcoming committees for the magnet in Pickering and Ajax during the last week of August. Congrats indeed to everyone involved!
Notwithstanding the tremendous benefits of the above, I'm wondering if we shouldn't also be using our health care dollars at the front-end, i.e. for preventative health education; nothing would please me more in a few years to read that this new MRI has been under-utilized and the major reason for the latter being attributed, with utmost certainty, to healthier communities!
One can understandably tire from the constant media barrage of articles telling us stuff similar to the following:
"Hospital overcrowding is leading to patients being left on hallway stretchers in emergency departments, sometimes for more than a day... Surgeries are getting cancelled and more patients are getting hospital-acquired infections. Residents of some smaller communities have to travel further for health care because their local hospitals have been cut or closed. And outpatient clinics that provided services like physiotherapy have been shuttered."
I'm hopeful that after the upcoming Ontario elections, we'll see a much more concerted effort to put the major responsibility for quality of life squarely on the shoulders of the individual -- along with the requisite tools (such as connected PHRs, EMRs and EHRs), of course!
Martin Wiseman, the World Cancer Research Fund’s medical and scientific adviser suggests in a Toronto Star article on healthier living that:
"The real problem is not coming up with new solutions, the real problem is having the will to implement what we already know."
Before I close, I need to mention that I do value your time and thank you for the effort expended to read this blog; however, should you no longer wish to receive the notification e-mail, please take action as described at the bottom of the latter -- sure I'll be upset, but I'll get over it much more quickly if you promise to at least check out this blog occasionally.
To your good health.
Ernest A. James
President & CEO
Regal Informatics Inc.
