Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
chapter 3
lessons from SarS:
Past Practice, Future Innovation
carolyn bennett
We are not tinkers who merely patch and mend what is broken … We must be
watchmen, guardians of the life and health of our generation, so that stronger and
more able generations may come after.
—Elizabeth Blackwell
In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D.—the first woman to graduate from medical school
in the United States—made some compelling observations about the importance of
population health. She was not the first, however, to express a memorable sentiment
of this kind. More than four millennia earlier, Shi Huangdi, china's Yellow emperor,
outlined the importance of keeping a population healthy when he said that 'to
administer medicines to diseases which have already developed … is comparable
to the behaviour of those persons who begin to dig a well after they have become
thirsty, and of those who begin to cast weapons after they have already engaged in
battle'. although simplistic, these logical principles remain an ongoing challenge,
integral to the foundation and growth of the canadian healthcare system.
tommy Douglas (1984), one of the founders of universal health care in canada
in the 1960s, emphasised the importance of disease prevention and health promotion
and believed that the primary objective 'must be to keep people well rather than just
patching them up when they got sick'. the emphasis on this task was underscored
by Marc lalonde (1974), canada's minister of health and welfare from 1972 to
1977, in a report entitled A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians: A Working
Document . laying out two objectives (reducing health risk and improving access to
care), Lalonde proposed five strategies for health: promotion, regulation, research,
system efficiency, and goal setting. These strategies have remained integral to
canada's health plan ever since. with the lalonde report, canada led the world in
the development of a population health approach. Since then, poverty, violence, the
environment, education, shelter, and equity are known to be as important to the health
of canadians as the 'sickness' care system. this consideration of population health
was again reflected in the development of the ottawa charter for Health Promotion,
adopted by the International conference on Health Promotion in 1986, which broadly
defines health promotion as the 'process of enabling people to increase control over,
and to improve, their health' (World Health Organization [WHO] 1986). In short, the
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search