Canada must act now to be prepared for the next health emergency, a new pandemic report warns

Canada must learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and take action before the next health emergency hits, an expert panel of doctors and researchers says in a new independent report.

“Most scientists believe it is only a matter of time before we face something similar to what we have experienced over the past five years,” said Dr. Fahad Razak, one of six experts who contributed to the report examining how scientific advice was developed and how research was coordinated.

“A lot of what we saw globally when we compared [pandemic] The responses show that preparedness is the crucial part.”

The panel’s report, entitled “The time to act is now,” says disease surveillance, hospitalization data and research results communicated much more effectively between the provinces, territories and the federal government.

“The fragmented nature of the way we run this country, with separate decisions being made in provinces and territories and what is being done in the federal government [level]really had a significant impact on how we responded to the pandemic,” said Razak, an internal medicine specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto who served as scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.

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The availability of health data varied across the country during the pandemic, making it “very difficult for us to get a national picture of what was happening,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

The report also says Canada should create a single, permanent scientific advisory group — something that has been done in Britain — rather than trying to bring together that expertise in the middle of an epidemic.

“There’s only so much you can do in the middle of a crisis. People are desperate, the infrastructure doesn’t work very well when there’s a crisis,” Razak said.

The report says that “the lack of pre-existing emergency protocols for scientific advice in Canada caused significant delays” and that better coordination was needed “within and between all levels of government.”

Communicating separately from scientific advisory groups at the federal and provincial levels “resulted in multiple streams of advice,” according to the report, which was released by the agency on Thursday. Health Canada requested it last August.

The report also recommended that evolving health information need to be shared with the public much more quickly.

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“I think the pandemic was a perfect example of the fact that if you don’t release that information publicly, it creates mistrust and misinformation,” Razak said.

“[The scientific advisory group’s] communications to the government should be released to the public almost as quickly as you generate them,” he said.

‘You want the audience be confident that they are also provided with the best available scientific evidence.”

Report highlights the role of inequality

The report says Canada must also address inequities among people most affected during emergencies, including people who are racialized, Indigenous peoples, people living in poverty, people experiencing homelessness and residents of long-term care facilities.

“More focus and investment are needed to support transdisciplinary research to identify the best ways to implement public health and other interventions to address well-documented inequities,” the report says.

That includes more funding for Indigenous-led research, the report said.

Dr. Shannon McDonald, another expert on the panel, said funding agencies should support different types of Indigenous-led research, including research that examines how factors such as colonization, trauma experiences and economic situations influence underlying health, which in turn could affect people’s risk of cancer. are disproportionately affected by emergencies.

Better data sharing between governments and First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities is also important, McDonald, Métis/Anishinaabe and former chief medical officer at B.C.’s First Nations Health Authority, said in an interview Wednesday.

That requires long-term collaborations, she says.

‘When we start talking about meaningful engagement [with] Indigenous peoples, it cannot be in the ad hoc manner that the millions of committees were formed when COVID was declared a public health emergency worldwide,” McDonald said.

“It’s really about the relationship that develops over time and supporting strategies and advancements in health data.”

Despite the shortcomings, Razak said there were many aspects of Canada’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to be proud of, including the use of wastewater monitoring to detect how much of the virus was present in communities.

“We were one of the pioneer countries and we certainly took this further on a larger scale than what many other countries could achieve,” he said.

But some provinces, including Ontario, have now made significant cuts to their wastewater monitoring programs, leaving many communities with “almost no data,” Razak said.

Canadian Press’ healthcare coverage is supported through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.