Coming Soon
Watch the Book Trailer below...
Original music for the book trailer: "Speechless" © Rik Barron. Used with permission.
Do you believe Canada’s health care system is working as well as it should be?
Despite having a publicly funded health care system, Canadians have suffered for years from a shortage of family doctors, excessively long wait times for specialists and investigations, overcrowded emergency departments, and “hallway medicine” in our hospitals.
It wasn’t always like this.
After over 40 years as a front-line traditional family doctor, Dr. Steve Barron outlines the vital signs warning us that Canada’s health care system has reached a crisis point. He traces the history of our publicly funded system, from its inception in the 1960s to the beginning of its decline in the mid-to-late 1990s, until the current day state of affairs.
What happened in the mid-to-late 1990s set off a chain of events that sent a healthy system into failure. Get deep into the published data and peer-reviewed literature with Dr. Barron, and explore the origins of hospital bed shortages, long wait times, family doctor shortage, and health professional burnout.
Dr. Barron follows a medical model to get the answers. He takes a history and makes a diagnosis. He then writes a prescription with specific operational goals that will put our system on the road to recovery, with a primary focus on high quality patient-centred care.
THE RISE AND FALL OF CANADA'S HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
A Canadian Voice
Failing Health: The Rise and Fall of Canada's Health Care System is a Canadian book about Canada's health care system, and while I probably did not get it 100% correct, I tried to write it using Canadian English conventions and spellings.
Readers from outside Canada, and even some Canadians accustomed to American or British English, may notice differences in the spelling of certain words. Examples include orthopaedics, centre, licence (noun), paediatrician, organization, sceptical, and health care (two words). These are not typographical errors, but the standard spelling traditionally used in Canadian English. Canadian English is a distinct variety of English with its own conventions. Depending on the word, Canadian spellings may differ from those used in American English, British English, or both. I used the Canadian Oxford Dictionary: Defining Canadian English (Second Edition, 2004) as my reference.
The main reason I've done this is very personal. The book is dedicated to my wife, Glenna. She was a talented writer who was very fussy about using Canadian English spellings in her writing. She encouraged me to write the book and before she died, she made me promise to finish it. I tried to use Canadian English spellings throughout the book as one small way to honour her memory. She would be proud of me for trying. If you encounter a word that you think is misspelled, it's probably just Canadian English, so take a moment and spare a thought for Glenna.
—Dr. Steve
A Special Tribute
My sister Jacqui helped me a lot with Failing Health. Her background in communications, writing, and editing was invaluable. She edited the first few drafts of the full manuscript before referring me on to FriesenPress. She also gave me a lot of moral support throughout the whole process. Sadly however, she will not see the finished product. She died unexpectedly on July 20th, 2026, after a very short hospitalization.
Below is a photograph I took in 2022 at Elk Island National Park in Alberta. Jacqui is in the driver's seat of her 2002 Land Rover Discovery II (Kalahari Special Edition), with my wife Glenna standing beside it. This is now a very special photograph of two women who I loved dearly, who are no longer with us. While Failing Health is dedicated to the memory of Glenna, it now also serves as a tribute to Jacqui.
