Hugh Armstrong – författare

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, clean, keep records, and do laundry make to health services. As a result of current reforms, these workers are increasingly treated as peripheral even though the research on what determines health demonstrates that their work is essential. The authors stress the invisibility and undervaluing of 'women's work' as well as the importance of context in understanding how this work is defined and treated.Through a gendered analysis, Critical to Care establishes a basis for discussing research, policy, and other actions in relation to the work of thousands of marginalized women and men every day.

Incorporating in-depth historical and empirical research, this book examines the widely acknowledged crisis in the long-term care labour force. A diverse array of experts compare labour force strategies in Canada, Norway and Sweden and invite readers to rethink approaches to the long term care labour force, starting with the lives of those who do the work.Focusing on different dominant strategies, chapter authors analyze how innovative approaches might be employed to reorganize, retain, reduce, replace, and recruit workers. They assess each strategy in terms of promoting the right to care and explore limitations on the right to access quality care services and the right to provide quality long-term care. Ultimately, they argue that the conditions of work are the conditions of care, conditions that include the overall structures, policies and practices that shape the work and care.The Labour Crisis in Long-term Care is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to students and researchers in health services, aging, labour policy, sociology of work and social work. Managers, researchers and leaders in health care and health policy decision-makers will also benefit from this important resource.

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 privatization.Privatization is the process of moving away not only from public delivery and public payment for health services but also from a commitment to shared responsibility, democratic decision-making, and the idea that the public sector operates according to a logic of service to all.This book documents moves toward privatization in the six countries and their consequences for families, staff, residents, and, eventually, us all. None of the countries has escaped pressure from powerful forces in and outside government pushing for privatization in all its forms. However, the wide variations in the extent and nature of privatization indicate privatization is not inevitable and our research shows there are alternatives.

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 privatization.Privatization is the process of moving away not only from public delivery and public payment for health services but also from a commitment to shared responsibility, democratic decision-making, and the idea that the public sector operates according to a logic of service to all.This book documents moves toward privatization in the six countries and their consequences for families, staff, residents, and, eventually, us all. None of the countries has escaped pressure from powerful forces in and outside government pushing for privatization in all its forms. However, the wide variations in the extent and nature of privatization indicate privatization is not inevitable and our research shows there are alternatives.

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 of knowing health care and focus on how such ways of knowing limit our understandings of and responses to health care problems and are linked with the growing commodification, individualization, and privatization of Canadian health services. Working with analytic perspectives such as feminism, Marxist political economy, critical ethnography, science and technology studies, governmentality studies, and institutional ethnography, the volume demonstrates how critical social science perspectives contribute alternative perspectives about what counts as health care problems and how to best to address them.

Health care is Canada’s best-loved social program–and for good reason. For more than 30 years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health care based on need and not on ability to pay. But it is a complex system: changes proposed and those already underway can be difficult to understand and evaluate. What do ‘public’ and ‘private’ mean as they apply to our current health care system and in proposed reforms? As the boomer generation ages, will the growing number of seniors bankrupt Medicare? What do we mean by wait times and are they increasing? Who pays for drugs and how can we ensure Canadians have equitable access to necessary drugs? Can technologies significantly improve care and reduce costs? This book explains how the Canadian system works and assesses reforms underway.

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 based on poor, partial or even false information. Our best defence of a public system is knowledge about how it works and how it can be improved in order to keep it.This second edition of About Canada: Health Care is an accessible, up-to-date introduction to how the Canadian health care system works, how it is changing and what can be done to make it better. Pat and Hugh Armstrong explain a range of complicated and important questions: What do “public” and “private” mean as they apply to our current health care system and in proposed reforms? As the boomer generation ages, will the growing number of seniors bankrupt Medicare? What do we mean by wait times and are they increasing? Who pays for drugs and how can we ensure Canadians have equitable access to necessary drugs? Can technologies significantly improve care and reduce costs?