Should We Allow More Private Healthcare?
Ronald Kustra the executive director of the Association of Canadians for Sustainable Medicare says yes Several years ago I chatted with two passengers seated next to me in the airplane. From [...]
Healthcare
Healthcare
The Consequences of How We Pay Doctors
At approximately 9:21 p.m., on May 18, 2015, a couple driving on Edmonton’s Yellowhead Trail called 911 to report a suspected impaired driver. They said he appeared “like someone high on drugs.” [...]
Should Vaccinations Be Mandatory?
DR. UBAKA OGBOGU SAYS YES. In March 2016 over 100 people were exposed to measles—a serious, vaccine-preventable disease—at Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton. The source of the [...]
Reducing the Harm
It’s a little after 10 o’clock in the morning and Taylor feels like she’s climbing the walls. When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes [...]
Meet the Minister: Sarah Hoffman
AV: What does our healthcare system do very well? Triage. My mom remarried a few years ago, and the gentleman she married has a heart condition and has ended up in emergency more than once. They [...]
By AV Staff
Optical Illusion
My 94-year-old mother and I are sitting in a southwest Calgary medical office and settling in to spend the day. It will be a long one but by the time we leave, my mother will have a new right eye [...]
When Things Fall Apart
Life is filled with surprises. So, on the day that I drove my brother, Olivier, to emergency to be treated for a psychotic episode, during that evening when we sat in emergency for nearly 12 [...]
By Clem Martini
A Different Prescription
A country that prides itself on its universal healthcare system has a glaring coverage gap: pharmaceutical drugs. As doctors and academics in this field, we see the consequences. Take, for [...]
Assisted Dying
It was the summer of 2015, and Hanne Schafer—a 65-year-old Calgarian psychologist who loved opera and camping and her husband of nine years—decided it was time. Over the previous two years, [...]
Holy Healthcare
Just tell them we don’t have it here.” That’s what the nurse told me in Killam Hospital, an hour east of Camrose. I’d asked what would happen if a woman came into our ER asking for the [...]
By Ryan Hoskins
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
The Big Man in Cargo Shorts
Leonard was the first to find him. The man was face down in the school’s outdoor learning space, next to a planter of basil. He was fat, his calves the size of a turkey dinner, his hair a gnarled mess of seaweed. Leonard wondered if the man was dead and ...