Canadian Health Information Podcast

Since the start of the pandemic, many Canadians have turned to online resources to stay informed. The crisis has been accompanied by an overabundance of information, and not all of it true, which has made it very difficult for people to find facts and reliable sources. We speak with André Picard, award-winning author and journalist, and health columnist at The Globe and Mail, about what it’s like to report during the pandemic, how social media has changed his work and the long-term effects he hopes COVID-19 will have on Canada’s health systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed some clear gaps in Canada’s health care systems, including the need to better understand the roots of health inequalities and disparities based on race. On this episode of the CHIP, host Avis Favaro speaks with Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa, poet, author, advocate and the only Black woman ever selected as sole valedictorian at the University of Toronto’s medical school, about the value of race-based data and the importance of Black representation in health care in Canada. This episode is available in English only.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed life as Canadians knew it beginning in spring 2020, and among the hardest-hit groups were children and youth. On this week’s show, host Avis Favaro digs into the data with CIHI’s manager of Health System Analytics, Liudmila Husak. She is then joined by Chris Daken of Fredericton, N.B., who talks about losing his 16-year-old daughter, Lexi, to suicide amid the pandemic; and by Dr. Chris Wilkes, the division head for child and adolescent psychiatry for Alberta Health Services and the University of Calgary, on how mental health experts have been dealing with the effects the pandemic has had on our kids. This episode is available in English only.

While COVID-19 has knocked the opioid crisis out of the headlines, the factors that led to it are still in play. Even worse, many have been amplified. We speak with Josée Joliat, a public health nurse at Public Health Sudbury, and Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, the medical health officer at Vancouver Coastal Health, to get their perspectives on what pandemic measures and restrictions have meant in their communities. Vous préférez les balados français? Voyez le Balado d’information sur la santé au Canada.