Webinar – What Can We Learn from Public Health Expenditure Data in Canada from 1975 to 2018?

This webinar presented and discussed key findings from research led and published by Dr. Mehdi Ammi, Professor at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration in Ottawa, entitled, “Interpreting Forty-Three-Year Trends of Expenditures on Public Health in Canada: Long-Run Trends, Temporal Periods, and Data Differences.” The NCCHPP is involved in this project as a public health knowledge user.

Context

Among the elements needed to renew and strengthen public health outlined in the Chief Public Health Officer’s 2021 report is the need to ensure stable and consistent funding across all public health systems in Canada. The report also calls for more transparent and accessible data on public health spending to inform accountability mechanisms and decision making.

While Canada has the highest share of public expenditures on public health among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, little is known about the evolution and composition of these expenditures and how they compare at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels. This is what Dr Ammi and his team have tried to better understand. In this webinar, Dr, Ammi will begin by presenting the main results of a research that examines the evolution of per capita public health expenditures over the years 1975 to 2018 at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels, comparing them to expenditures in three other fields of the health sector that are also publicly funded (medication, hospitals, and physicians). He will then comment on the strengths and limitations of the Canadian Institute for Health Information public health expenditures data and those from provincial sources. At the end of his presentation, he will take questions from webinar participants.

Speaker

Dr. Mehdi Ammi
Associate Professor in with the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa
Dr. Mehdi Ammi is Associate Professor in with the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is also an Honorary Associate Professor with the University of Queensland in Australia and President-Elect of the Canadian Health Economics Association. Dr. Ammi’s research spans health economics, applied micro-econometrics, and health policy. His current work investigates the determinants, trends, and effects of public health financing; accessibility of care, including the influence of the pandemic; and topics at the intersection of behavioural economics and health economics, including questions about loneliness and the sense of belonging.