Quebec says it wants to get ahead of chronic illnesses and invest more in screenings and pilot projects to detect at-risk individuals.
It’s part of the provincial government’s preventative health care strategy, released Thursday, which Minister of Health Christian Dubé hopes will help ease pressure off the network.
“We really have to act at the source. The sustainability of our health care network depends on it,” said Dubé, during a news conference this morning.
Over the next 10 years, Dubé says he wants to see a 10 per cent reduction in the impact of chronic illnesses in Quebec and a 10 per cent reduction in the gap in premature mortality linked to socioeconomic inequalities.
For its first year, the plan includes a $5 million investment into screenings for Type 2 diabetes and HPV, among other illnesses. Dubé says he wants to re-purpose some of the infrastructure set up for COVID-19 tests and vaccinations and turn them into “prevention centres.”
The provincial strategy also targets tobacco dependence with a $4 million investment and seeks to promote physical activity among the more sedentary sectors of the population with a $5 million investment. Other measures include smaller investments into research and public participation.
“We have major challenges, we know it, but notably due to the aging of the population,” said Dubé. “It’s not because it’s not okay to age, but we have to be able to live with the impacts and to work on that.”
