Public sector health expenditure in Canada: 1980-2010

This chart, prepared in partnership with the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF), shows the impact of the recession in Canada in the 1990s on public spending on health.

Government spending on health fell steadily between 1992 and 1996 (the period immediately following the recession), forcing job losses and hospital closures across Canada.  It is notable that once the Canadian economy recovered from 1997, so did health spending, which by 2010 had recovered to the levels it would have reached if there had been no recession.  Click on the name of a series underneath the x axis, to remove that series from display. 

This chart forms part of a Nuffield Trust and CHSRF research study looking at the Canadian experience of managing health reform in a time of austerity and the lessons for the NHS in England.

The report: Managing health reform through an economic downturn (October 2011), by Nuffield Trust Senior Fellow Ruth Thorlby, is based on presentations and discussions from a partnership seminar held jointly by the two organisations in May 2011, and explores how politicians and policy-makers from two Canadian provinces handled the impact of hospital closures and other austerity measures on the health system.

The work forms part of the wider Nuffield Trust research project: Managing the NHS through the financial squeeze: learning from international experience.