Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation: About Us

The Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation understands Canada's health care and charitable environments. Our position statements on public policy are one of the ways we demonstrate our support of stakeholders.

The Foundation advocates in the best interests of patients. We encourage patients and all Canadians to exercise their right to advocate respectfully for one's self and for improvements to our health care system.

The Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation supports the concept of Maximum Acceptable Wait Times and urges First Ministers to actively invest in the necessary resources to achieve and surpass these benchmarks.

Canada's Prime Minister and provincial and territorial Premiers (First Ministers) reached an agreement for rescuing the nation's ailing health-care system. We believe the Health Accord is a positive step, and intend to help ensure the promised provisions related to improved access to orthopaedic care are realized for the benefit of all orthopaedic patients.

Canadian patients must often endure lengthy wait times - sometimes a year or more - before they have their surgery, which can cause physical, emotional, and economic burdens for those patients and their families. We believe Canadians need and deserve timely access to quality orthopaedic care.

Because of lengthy regulatory approval times and limited health care budgets, patients may not always receive the best medicine or medical device to suit their needs. We support regulatory reform to ensure patients have access to the best available medicines and medical devices for their needs - not simply the lowest-cost option.

Cross-border sales of prescription medication and the challenges this activity creates have the capacity to reduce the quantity available and increase their costs to Canadians, thus adding another stumbling block to accessing quality orthopaedic care. We believe that further public debate is necessary to clarify public policy and future action on the issue.

Since digital data is so easily transferred from one computer to another, government has responded with legislation to protect privacy. We support such legislation protecting personal privacy in proper balance with supporting a charitable organization's ability to achieve its socially beneficial mandate.

The documents on this page are available in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), and can be opened with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't already have this software installed on your computer, you can download it by clicking here.

Positions on Public Policy