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 flexible, varying considerably with conditions, time, place and intersectional populations. By examining the complex labour process within nursing homes, this book provides insight and understanding which will be critical in planning for nursing home care post-pandemic.

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.