Opinion
It’s time to abandon the ‘detect and react’ approach to managing crises
By Craig Stephen and Justina C. Ray November 2, 2020
We need to stop squandering the tremendous health assets nature has gifted us and ensure we do not leave future generations with an impoverished foundation for health.
Our health care system is still largely geared to deliver reactive rather than preventative care, write Craig Stephen and Justina C. Ray. Photograph courtesy of Unsplash
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical role that underlying socio-economic and political factors—often called social determinants—play in health outcomes. But while factors like poverty, education, and access to health care have been well understood for decades to have a serious, and combined, impact on the state of our health, the role that the health of the natural world has in shaping the determinants of health and health outcomes has largely been ignored in Canada.
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