Health care is Canada’s best-loved social program — and for good reason. For over forty years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health services based on need rather than on ability to pay. Yet we hear almost daily accounts of problems with the system. We are bombarded with warnings that public health care is unsustainable, especially in light of the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age. Such stories can help undermine our support for public care even though they are often base...

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease known as COVID-19, has infected people in 212 countries so far and on every continent except Antarctica.Vast changes to our home lives, social interactions, government functioning and relations between countries have swept the world in a few months and are difficult to hold in one’s mind at one time. That is why a collaborative effort such as this edited, multidisciplinary collection is needed. This book confronts the vulne...

Wasting Away is a provocative text that examines and assesses the Canadian health care system. This seven-chapter book explores the development of the Canadian health care system and breaks the analysis down into accessible units: who provides (the institutions and the people); who pays (funding sources); and who decides (public, private, and patients). The concluding chapter sums up the winners and losers in this system. A new Introduction by the authors thoroughly updates the subject.

Creative Team Work describes a new way of doing rapid ethnography to capture the rich complexity and contradictions of social relations. It is about the imagination, stimulation, and reflection that can come with international, interdisciplinary teams sharing the development, application, analysis, and dissemination of research. Although the book is based on a large, seven-year project studying care homes to search for promising practices and is guided by feminist political econom...

The COVID pandemic has shaken the material and social foundations of the world more than any event in recent history and has highlighted and exacerbated a longstanding crisis of care. While these challenges may be freshly visible to the public, they are not new. Over the last three decades, a growing body of care scholarship has documented the inadequacy of the social organization of care around the world, and the effect of the devaluation of care on workers, families, and communities. In ...

Austerity was presented as the antidote to sluggish economies, but it has had far-reaching effects on jobs and employment conditions.With an international team of editors and authors from Europe, North America and Australia, this illuminating collection goes beyond a sole focus on public sector work and uniquely covers the impact of austerity on work across the private, public and voluntary spheres.Drawing on a range of perspectives, the book engages with the major debates ...

In Health Matters, contributors from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary traditions address multiple dimensions of health care, such as nursing, midwifery, home care, pharmaceuticals, medical education, and palliative care. Through their explorations, the book poses questions about the role that the forms of expertise associated with evidence-based health care play in shaping how we understand and organize health services. Authors critique instrumental, managerial ways o...

With increasing demands for evidence-based decision-making, the academic community must be ready to train researchers who can reduce the gap between health care research and practice. One program dedicated to promoting such training is the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF, now the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement) and Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Chair Program. Participants of these programs were selected to develop innovative research pro...

Clothing and appearance are steeped in social and personal significance, conveying individuals’ gender, class, culture, and occupation. In the communal setting of long-term residential care, where residents’ autonomy and mobility are often limited but their dignity and identity are paramount, clothes have become crucial issues and the source of tension for residents, their families, and staff.Assessing the neglected but important labour involved in ensuring that clothes promote res...

Nursing homes are where some of the most vulnerable live and work. In too many homes, the conditions of work make it difficult to make care as good as it can be. For the last eight years an international team from Germany, Sweden, Norway, the UK, the US and Canada have been searching for promising practices that treat residents, families and staff with dignity and respect in ways that can also bring joy. While we did find ideas worth sharing, we also saw a disturbing trend toward privatiza...

Who counts as a health care worker? The question of where we draw the line between health care workers and non-health care workers is not merely a matter of academic nicety or a debate without consequences for care. It is a central issue for policy development because the definition often results in a division among workers in ways that undermine care.Critical to Care uses a wide range of evidence to reveal the contributions that those who provide personal care, who cook, ...

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.The COVID-19 pandemic has made unpaid care more visible through its absence, while also increasing the need for it.Drawing on a range of research projects covering Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, this book documents a broad spectrum of unpaid work performed by residents, relatives, volunteers and staff in nursing homes.It demonstrates how boundaries between paid and unpaid work are fle...