With everyone's attention on COVID-19, these health issues kept festering. Now they demand attention

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

Four years — yes, four whole years — after the virus behind COVID-19 exploded into public consciousness, health-care teams and scientists are tackling a host of pressing health issues that took a backseat during the pandemic.

Around the world, researchers are exploring new applications for groundbreaking CRISPR gene therapy. Scientists are also bracing for the ongoing health impacts of antimicrobial resistance and climate change. And teams of virologists, epidemiologists and physicians are racing to prevent the next pandemic by tracking instances of viral spillover from animals to humans, ranging from well-known threats like bird flu to the looming unknowns of tomorrow.

All the while, Canada's hospital system is in crisis, and drug toxicity deaths keep going up.

Here are the top medical stories CBC health and science reporters will be watching in the year ahead:

A shortage of family doctors is sending more Canadians into emergency rooms. A lack of total hospital beds leaves people sitting in emergency rooms. Nurses, often referred to as the beating heart of the health-care system, are in short supply. And, waitlists for non-life threatening surgeries are far too long.

We know what's broken in Canada's health-care system, but will the changes provinces are making fix those problems? That's what we'll be watching in 2024.

Politicians in Alberta and Quebec are making seismic changes to health care. Both are continuing to embrace an "entrepreneurial vision" to delivering health care, despite evidence showing a "social vision" may be more beneficial. Based on what's been disclosed so far, experts don't think either province will adequately address the real problems and deliver better care.

Manitoba's new premier promised fixes that have some health-care workers feeling more hopeful. We'll continue to watch how that progresses, along with Ontario's bill that's allowing for more publicly covered, private for-profit care.

The federal government is now gathering more data from provinces — hopefully it will reveal what's working, where and why.

Either way, health care in Canada is changing, and it affects all of us. We'll keep you posted.

— Christine Birak and Marcy Cuttler

WATCH | Staff shortages, surgery backlogs plague health-care system:

After a year of record-breaking temperatures, I'll be watching to see how climate change affects the world's population in 2024, and what we do collectively to address the problem.