This thoughtful book provides a refreshing, comparative perspective on the future of care homes in our post-pandemic world. Building on more than a decade of collaborative international and interdisciplinary research in Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, it employs a feminist political economy framework to address the key challenges facing care homes in this turbulent era. With particular attention to lessons learned in Canada, Sweden, and Norway, the contributing authors argue that publicly-funded care homes remain critical to care arrangements but require policy and practice transformations to produce equitable and supportive conditions. Attentive to the specific contexts and tensions that shape care, chapters address key questions about care home quality and labour in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, religion and class. The book analyses the physical and social boundaries that set the conditions for quality of life and care, moving beyond the minimum to explain how nursing homes can provide joy. Offering alternative approaches to the complex challenges facing this vital public service, this book will be a key reference for students and scholars of health policy, comparative social policy and social work. Its integration of statistical, policy and practice analysis with ethnographic research will prove invaluable to those concerned with long-term care policy and practice.

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.

Creative Team Work describes a new way of doing rapid ethnography to capture the rich complexity and contradictions of social relations. It is about the imagination, stimulation, and reflection that can come with international, interdisciplinary teams sharing the development, application, analysis, and dissemination of research. Although the book is based on a large, seven-year project studying care homes to search for promising practices and is guided by feminist political economy, the lessons we have learned are relevant for everyone undertaking empirical investigation. All research needs to consider theory - the organization of information, ethics, and dissemination, for example. The specific techniques and approaches the authors discuss can be applied to a wide range of qualitative methods and are not exclusive to this kind of ethnography. By dissecting experiences and uniting chapters through the theme of creative, reflexive team work, the book considers issues and methods of interest to all those struggling through the research process, with or without team support.

As access to sufficient health care continues to become a dominant--and divisive--issue in the world today, this resource acts as a primer to the public health care system Canada has had in place for the last 30 years. While explaining the program's cost efficiency and dramatically better health outcomes compared with the United States' private health care system, it also addresses the complexities of the program, as well as the aspects that need improvement--such as wait times and the aging boomer generation. This analysis offers a detailed introduction on how the Canadian system works and assesses reforms currently underway, concluding that expanding Canada's public health care system, rather than privatizing it, is the best way to improve it.

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.