Blogs

Toolbox for Improving Health in Cities

Draft. 2003.

This paper is based on research conducted by Health and Everything and the Canadian Urban Institute for Wellesley Central Health Corporation (WCHC). The consultants were asked to develop a framework that would guide an urban health initiative by WCHC in Southeast Toronto. The research results can be used by other organizations with a mandate to promote health in cities and, it is hoped, will lead to a new understanding of health in cities.

How Health Care Systems Become Complex

This presentation was delivered:

  • To the Association of Discharge Planning Coordinators of Ontario ( Toronto, Ontario), May 29, 2004.
  • To the Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres, Millcroft Inn ( Alton, Ontario), October 19, 2003.
  • To the Canada Study Tour of NHS Chief Executives at the Change Foundation ( Toronto, Ontario), September 19, 2003.
  • To Meeting Patient Needs: Achieving and Sustaining Practical Change sponsored by the Department of Human Services Victoria ( Melbourne, Australia) May 22, 2003.
  • To the St. Andrew’s Club ( Toronto, Ontario) June 12, 2003.

Complicated and Complex Systems: What Would Successful Reform of Medicare Look Like?

A discussion paper written for the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (The Romanow Commission), 2002.

In this paper we argue that health care systems are complex, and that repairing them is a complex problem. Most attempts to intervene in Medicare (and in many other health care systems) treat them as if they were merely complicated. We demonstrate this failure of understanding by tracing the deterioration of Medicare through a series of complicated interventions to its present destabilized state. We identify the tensions that seem to represent intractable problems in the Canadian and other systems that elicit strong responses from warring ideologies and professions.