Research involves

Studying the delivery of health-care delivery for common medical conditions such as diabetes, cerebrovascular and venous thromboembolic diseases.

Research relevance

Database will assist health-care planners in redesigning health services.

The Future of Health Care

It's time to consider some important health care questions:

• Is Canada's universal health-care system really accessible to everyone?
• What roles do sex, ethnicity, and geographic location play in patient care?
• Are waiting times for treatment too long and putting people's lives at risk?

These are just some of the questions Dr. William Ghali is working to answer in his ongoing Health and Population study.

Cardiac disease and diabetes are widespread throughout the population but, it seems, access to the latest treatments is not so evenly dispersed. Most if not all of our specialized cardiac facilities are housed in major metropolitan centers. A number of studies suggest that women, minorities, and those in rural areas do not enjoy the same level of care as the urban majority.

Compared with the US, the Canadian health-care system is highly centralized when it comes to high-tech services. How long a patient waits for those services will also be reviewed. A comparison of the survival rates of patients with the time they spend awaiting treatment may offer health-care planners a new perspective on how to distribute their services.

A researcher and author, Dr.Ghali enjoys a broad influence among health-care planners. As director of research analysis, he plays a pivotal role in the Alberta Provincial Program for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease. This study tracks all patients undergoing cardiac procedures according to where they live. Data from that survey is part of a collaborative national study of health-care services.

As part of his study, Dr.Ghali will try to evaluate the effectiveness of a number of coronary procedures and try to answer one central question: Does spending more on high-tech treatment automatically equate with better care?

A unique aspect of Dr.Ghali's study involves conducting patient interviews. By interviewing the patients, researchers hope to determine if their attitudes and preferences also play a role in the quality of the care they receive.

This segment of the ongoing research will take five years to complete. It's likely that health-care planners will be paying close attention to the results as they're released. The new statistical picture of health services in Alberta and other provinces is expected to have a significant bearing on how all those billions of health-care dollars are spent.