Chapter 6 Chapter Overview & Learning Objectives

Chapter Summary

This chapter provides students with an overview of the historical conditions and events that contributed to the development of Canada’s health-care system. More specifically, the chapter offers students a detailed description of how federal legislation and funding formulas impacted provincial and territorial decision-making when designing and delivering health services. The strengths and limitations of Canada’s universal health-care system are discussed and examples of the growing privatization of health care across the country are offered.

The chapter then discusses the roles social workers play in a variety of health-related settings, such as hospitals, palliative care, and mental health contexts. Examples of how social workers in these fields of practice can work at the individual, small group, and community level are offered.

Finally, the chapter takes an expansive notion of health by introducing students to the social determinants of health framework. Myriad examples and empirical evidence are offered to highlight how social conditions such as income, early childhood and adolescence, unemployment and working conditions, food insecurity, housing, Indigenous status, racialized identity, disability, gender, access to health services, substance use and abuse, and education shape the health of individuals, families, and communities both directly and indirectly. Students are challenged to consider how a holistic understanding of health promotion, prevention, and treatment can impact policy development, service delivery, and social work practice.

Learning Objectives

The goal of this chapter is to do the following:

1. Review the historical conditions and events that shaped the development of the Canadian health-care system.
2. Highlight key provisions of Canada’s health-care delivery system.
3. Identify health inequalities in the Canadian health-care system and social workers’ roles in addressing these inequalities.
4. Illustrate how forms of privatization have entered into Canada’s universal health system.
5. Outline various roles social workers fulfill in health- and social-care settings.
6. Introduce the social determinants of health model to understand contributors to the physical and mental health of individuals and families.