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Health Matters

Health Matters

Evidence, Critical Social Science, and Health Care in Canada

Edited by Eric Mykhalovskiy, Jacqueline Choiniere, Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

3 b&w illustrations, 8 b&w tables

Digital download
9781487536961
Published: May 2020

Digital download
9781487536978
Published: May 2020

Description
Contents
Authors

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.

1. Introduction
Eric Mykhalovskiy, Jacqueline A. Choiniere, Pat Armstrong, and Hugh Armstrong

SECTION 1—What Counts as Evidence?: Managerial Knowledge, Visibility and Experience

2. Dematerialization of Fundamental Nursing Care in an Era of Managerial Reforms
Craig Dale

3. From “Making a Decision” to “Decision Making”: A Critical Reflection on a Discursive Shift
Mary Ellen Macdonald and David K. Wright

4. Code Work: RAI-MDS, Measurement, Quality and Work Organization in Long-term Care Facilities in Ontario
Tamara Daly, Jacqueline A. Choiniere, and Hugh Armstrong

5. Disputing Evidence: Canadian Health Professionals’ Responses to Evidence About Midwifery
Vicki Van Wagner RM, PhD and Elizabeth Darling RM, PhD

6. “Tell Me Where It Hurts:” A Case Study of the Impacts of Structural Violence, Syndemic Suffering, and Intergenerational Trauma on Indigenous People’s Health
Christianne V. Stephens

7. Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Broadening the Discourse on Quality Improvement in the Home Care System
Alisa Grigorovich

SECTION 2— Health Markets, Individualization and Commodification

8. Cigarette Packaging Legislation in Canada and the Smoking Subject
Kirsten Bell

9. Public Good, or Goods for the Public: The Commercialization of Academic Health Research
Kelly Holloway and Matthew Herder

10. Making Sense of Vaginal Mesh
Ariel Ducey, with Barry Hoffmaster, Magali Robert, and Sue Ross

11. Seeking Disability Politics in Disability and Health-Related Non-Profit Organizations
Christine Kelly

12. Medical Laboratories: For-Profit Delivery and the Disintegration of Public Health Care
Ross Sutherland

13. Nail Salons, Toxics and Health: Organizing for a Better Work Environment
Anne Rochon Ford

14. Conclusion. Health Matters: Research in Practice
Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline A. Choiniere, Eric Mykhalovskiy

About the Authors

Eric Mykhalovskiy is a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University.

Jacqueline Choiniere is an associate professor with the School of Nursing in the Faculty of Health at York University.

Hugh Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor and professor emeritus of Social Work, Political Economy, and Sociology at Carleton University.