Dr. Janet Kushner-Kow is the physician program director of elder care at Providence Health Care and division head of geriatric medicine at the University of British Columbia.
Our health-care system is very energy intensive and produces large volumes of solid waste and toxic waste. But this is, in fact, counter to our ethical duty to do no harm, which must include not harming the environment and the health of people and communities.
Canadian health professionals have a role to play in protecting and restoring the health of the planet, which is after all the ultimate determinant of the health of the population.
The past year has seen mounting public calls for the resignations of chief medical officers of health, either for being too power hungry or abandoning the public, depending on the complainants’ station and political bent. They are subject to attacks by opposition parties for their complicity, or abandoned by the governing party as scapegoats for policy decisions.
Once a custom practised mainly by the Lakota Indigenous tribes, sweat lodges are growing in popularity in British Columbia, cropping up on many rural properties and Indigenous lands as group gatherings and tourists promise to return now that the pandemic is receding.
The theme for World Health Day reflects a growing global concern with the health impacts of massive and rapid human-driven ecological changes. While climate change is front of mind, having been recognized as “the single biggest health threat facing humanity” by the WHO as far back as 2008, the changes and challenges we face are far greater than that.
The federal government’s national $10-a-day child care program is cause for celebration. But there is a lot more that still needs to be done in both the public and private sectors to support parents post-partum.
Canadian emergency physician and journalist Anthony Fong describes his experience at the Ukraine-Polish border, treating Ukrainian refugees fleeing the full-scale invasion of their country.
Creating inclusive environments for LGBT+ clients has not occurred on a broad scale in Canada or elsewhere. The onus is on the health-care system and its leaders, from the local level to the federal government, to address LGBT+ health inequity. The lives of millions of people depend on it.
The true challenge of transformation is the need for leaders to see it not as simply a cumulation of changes, reforms or innovations but as a process of collective people change, regardless of the role one plays in health care.
Face masks have helped gain the upper hand against COVID-19, but if we continue to consider the needs of today above sustainability for tomorrow, it might not even matter.
Tuberculosis has been around for millennia and continues to circulate to this day. On World TB Day, Stop TB Canada has launched a new tracker to hold the government accountable to its elimination targets.
Unarguably, a profound weakness in our public health response to COVID-19 has been the equity-blind approach that numerous jurisdictions adopted when the pandemic began.
Canadians should be aware that PocketWell will extract a significant amount of data from users. And as data has now become the most valuable commodity on Earth, this raises major concerns.
My illness is not your adjective. If you are acting unhinged, you are not “psychotic.” If you’re feeling unstable, you’re not “bipolar.” In the same way, if you like things neatly arranged, you’re not “so OCD.”