Grant: CIHR Café Scientifique Program

There are many different cultural values and ideals about how best to divide up responsibility for our own health and for the health of the environment that we live in so that we can all be as healthy as possible. Different people have different views about how much of this responsibility should be taken on by governments and other organized institutions versus how much of this responsibility should be shouldered by individuals. In this Café, we will discuss research that has been done on answering the question: How do different cultural ideals about the responsibilities that organized groups (such as institutions and governments) have versus the responsibilities that individuals have, affect how healthy people end up being and how healthy the environment that supports them ends up being? This question is important because it affects things like how much money governments should spend supporting our health and whether there are more cost-effective ways to promote health instead. Knowing the answer to this question helps us to figure out how best to shape the health and environmental policy of groups like governments. We will focus our discussion specifically on how these policies and commitments affects the health and health-environments of Northern communities. We are also going to discuss research that has been done on answering the question: How do different approaches and attitudes to dividing up responsibility for health between health care workers (such as physicians) and patients, actually end up affecting health outcomes? As we will see, the approach to dividing up responsibility has a particularly big effect when it comes to the health of those people who have been in the past been more disempowered in the doctor-patient relationship. Thus, answering this question can help us figure out how to further improve the health of members of Indigenous communities, women, and children.