What makes people sick? Infectious agents like bacteria and viruses and personal factors like smoking, eating poorly and living a sedentary lifestyle. But none of these compares to the way that poverty makes us sick.
Over three million Canadians struggle to make ends meet. Four health care experts explain why poverty should be treated as an urgent medical issue in Canada, not just a moral one.
As a medical student taking part in a Social Paediatrics course at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), I was recently immersed in the lives and healthcare needs of low-income families in Toronto. This experience reshaped the lens through which I now view healthcare and helped me recognize that societal factors greatly influence the emotional and physical wellbeing of children and their families.
Does more healthcare create better outcomes? In other words, do more medications, tests and interventions necessarily result in healthier patients?
It turns out more care is, all too often, unnecessary care.
In any developed country, politicians and clinicians are struggling to improve quality of care while reducing costs of healthcare systems.
A Toronto doctor named Gary Bloch has developed a poverty tool for medical practitioners. It helps assess what patients might need other than prescriptions for the newest drugs; it zooms in on the social determinants of health — food, housing, transportation — all poverty markers linked to bad health and poor health outcomes.
The latest report from the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) will give educators in Manitoba pause for thought: Manitoba performed poorly relative to their peers across the country.
When counseling patients on health, physicians often focus on lifestyle changes such as diet, exercise or smoking. This kind of advice can be important for the individual, but does little to change underlying drivers of health like income, education and employment. These factors are the ones that have the greatest impact on whether patients will be able to eat well, move around or butt out.
