The Canadian Health Care System - 1694 Words

Introduction The Canadian health care system fosters universal and comprehensive access to essential health care services (Flood, 2004). However, there have been debates on what services are necessary as espoused in the Canada Health Act (Caulfield, 1996; Caulfield Zarzeczny, 2014; Charles, Lomas, Giacomini, 1997). Although there are similarities among provinces in terms of core services covered under publicly funded medical care, some variability still exists across provinces (Charles et al., 1997). Under the current universal and comprehensive health care policy, oral health care is not covered under the publicly funded health care services (Leake, 2006; Quià ±onez, 2013). Nonetheless, some provinces such as Alberta, Manitoba and†¦show more content†¦This paper is organized into five main sections. The first section discusses the existing literature on oral health care in provincial Canada, as well as, issues of access and use of dental health services. The second section specifical ly focuses on the data used in the study and the methods of analysing the data. In addition, this section also delves into the models used in determining relationships and associations between the key dependent variables (consultation with a dentist, an actual visit to a dentist, and last time visited a dentist) and socio-economic and health characteristics of respondents as independent variables. The third section of the paper then presents the findings of the descriptive and inferential statistics generated from the data. The fourth section discusses the results of the study in relation to reviewed literature, as well as, their implications on provincial and federal health policies. The limitations of the study in terms of methodology and analysis are subsequently discussed in this section too. The fifth section concludes the paper with an overview of the findings of the study and inter-provincial differences in access and use of dental services in Alberta, Manitoba and Newfoundl and. Access and Usage of