Each single little one in Canada experiences ache from medical procedures, beginning inside hours of being born. Left untreated, this ache can negatively affect their lifelong relationship with sickness and medical encounters, together with avoidance of routine vaccinations and preventive well being checks.
Almost eight million Canadians, together with one out of 5 kids, stay with persistent ache, costing an estimated $40 billion per yr. Nobody ought to expertise preventable ache — notably not kids and youth, and particularly not when easy options exist already.
This Nationwide Ache Consciousness Week, because the federal authorities works towards pharmacare laws and as native governments and well being authorities attempt to handle important workforce shortages in well being care, we should all hold kids’s well being, and notably ache care, prime of thoughts.
Ache administration is a basic human proper. But, in Canada, two out of three kids expertise painful medical procedures with none ache administration.
Regardless of a common, publicly funded health-care system, Canada has fallen behind globally within the high quality of well being care we offer to kids on all fronts, rating thirtieth of 41 rich international locations for the psychological and bodily well-being of its kids. Worse, marginalized and racialized populations, together with Indigenous households and youngsters with disabilities, usually tend to expertise ache and fewer more likely to obtain remedy for it.
