For the last few months, friends, family, and those part of my social network may have noticed that I have been quite active on Twitter. I’ve discussed topics such as what my online professional presence looks like as a future public servant, and shared resources related to healthcare barriers in Canada and the strategies used to address them. My primary focus throughout this period was to always circle back to how these health outcomes related to government and health governance.
That said, the reason my online presence became more prominent was to fulfill my Foundations of Health Systems in Canada course requirements. However, engaging with my fellow peers and instructor has provided me with some interesting and unique insights that I would have otherwise overlooked. The course was full of students from diverse health professional backgrounds from all across Canada, as a result, I not only learned more about how health challenges are addressed from the perspective of their respectable fields, but I also gained insight into how provincial healthcare systems differed in their organizational structure and priorities. I would argue that such jurisdictional insight helped me better navigate successful policies and programs in other provinces and related these back to Nova Scotia. Or, to celebrate Nova Scotian healthcare achievements and consider how health strategies in Nova Scotia can aid other provinces with their healthcare needs.
This course began by laying the foundation of what is health and introducing a holistic understanding of health by exploring the social determinants of health. Then, models to categorize these determinants were studied, these models revealed the multilevel structure of health and served to help organize these determinants into different spheres of health which aids the development of health programs and policies. However, to obtain a fuller picture of how health barriers affected populations, vulnerable populations were studied in more detail. The study of vulnerable populations also better emphasized the importance of social determinants of health in achieving health outcomes. Finally, to tie everything together the future of health was discussed and future directions in healthcare in Canada explored. In order to establish a strong foundation in the study of any health system, the past, present, and future must be understood from multiple perspectives, Foundations of Health Systems in Canada has provided me the opportunity to pull all these tenets together and look at health from a more critical lens.
Now, when considering challenges in healthcare I aim to identify what determinants give rise to health outcomes of interest, how can these factors be organized to help health-professionals and governments better design interventions, what implications do these challenges and their solutions have on populations, and what actions need to be taken to mitigate for negative consequences, and finally what direction are these challenges going to head in the future and what future initiatives must be considered. While during these last few months the practice of curating and sharing various facets of healthcare and the Canadian healthcare system was to fulfill a course requirement, I now plan on making this practice a part of my regular online engagement.
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