Places MAP Team

Current Research Projects

Place and 21st Century Health Care

Recently the importance of “place” in human life has been highlighted in many disciplines. Places have recursive relationships with other social and cultural entities because they simultaneously shape and are shaped by human practices and institutions. Places have three defining features: location, material form, and meaningfulness. Fiscal, demographic, and social pressures, together with technological, medical and pharmacological advances have reconfigured places used for health care in various ways. The structure and function of many traditional settings, like hospitals and long-term care institutions, have been modified and many health care services currently are provided in places where people live, work, shop, and attend school. Moreover, it has become increasingly unnecessary for care providers and recipients to be proximal in space, as a result of the introduction of distance services for diagnostic, therapeutic, acute, palliative, and rehabilitative care. Such services range from health information provided over the Internet, to telephone triage and consultation, to remote monitoring and intervention technologies, and even robotic surgery. Under these new circumstances, the social, spatial, and political relations of health care have been altered irrevocably. The composition of health care teams has been transformed, with care recipients and non-traditional care providers, including families and volunteers, accorded significantly greater responsibility for health care management and service provision.

This MAP Team will address the geographical, psychological, socio-cultural, ethical, economic, legal, and political consequences of using a range of settings to provide and receive health care. The implications of permeable boundaries and the interconnections and relationships between and among various types of care providers, recipients and places will be emphasized.

Faculty will emphasize the CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research Theme, Public Advice Seeking in an Era of eHealth.

Special attention will be paid to: the means and methods Canadians use to receive health care in non-traditional settings; new roles and practices for professional care providers amidst surging public demand for health information and self-care; the use of information and communications technologies to enhance health outcomes in the new networks of geographically-dispersed health care; and the impact of “place” on health care access, practices, and quality. Issues pertaining to Improving Quality, Health Care Evaluation and Technology Assessment; and Health Human Resources will also be addressed.

Faculty include: Annmarie Adams (Architecture), Jim Dunn (Community Health), Alex Jadad (Medicine/eHealth), and Pascale Lehoux (Technology Assessment).