A reminder about tonight's book launch with Dr. Ryan Meili, co-sponsored by the Council of Canadians:
A Healthy Society:
How a Focus on Health can Revive Canadian Democracy
Edmonton Book Launch
and discussion with author Dr. Ryan Meili and Dr. Stan Houston
Monday, September
24 at 7:00 pm
Room 2-490,
Edmonton Clinic Health Academy
11405-87 Avenue,
University of Alberta Campus
There’s more to health than the medical system – there’s
democracy and social justice! Dr. Ryan Meili argues that health delivery too often
focuses on treatment of immediate causes and ignores more fundamental
conditions that lead to poor health in the first place. He explores how income,
education, employment and other factors make the difference in our health.
Dr. Meili’s new book, A
Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health can Revive Canadian Democracy,
brings the issues alive with real-life stories drawn from his experiences
working as a doctor in inner-city Canada and rural communities in Mozambique
and Saskatchewan.
When’s the last time the doctor ordered more democracy?
Join us as Dr. Meili calls for democratic reforms that could help reshape the
way we organize ourselves to create a truly healthy society.
Copies of A Healthy
Society will be available for purchase.
Sponsored by the Council of Canadians, United Nurses of
Alberta, Parkland Institute, Alberta Federation of Labour, Public Interest
Alberta, and Friends of Medicare.
For more information about the book and Ryan, visit
ryanmeili.ca.
About the Book
Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the
inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Meili argues
that health delivery too often focuses on treatment of immediate causes and
ignores more fundamental conditions that lead to poor health. Income,
education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports: far
more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers,
it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Brought
to life by patient stories, A Healthy
Society explores a number of specific health determinants, and ends in a
discussion of democratic reforms that could help reshape the way we organize
ourselves to create a truly healthy society.
Through a mix of scholarship and story, the author
proposes a new approach to politics. The use of human health as a measure of
our success as a society, and the application of the ideas of the social determinants
of health to public policy, appeals beyond political lines to common values. By
synthesizing diverse ideas into a plan for action based in the lived
experiences of practitioners and patients, A
Healthy Society breaks important ground in the renewal of politics toward
the goal of better lives for all Canadians.
Praise for A Healthy Society
“A Healthy Society
offers an inspiring means to fix what is broken in Canadian politics.”
- Roy Romanow
“We know it in our hearts: poor health is intimately
linked to poverty, abuse, and lack of social services. Yet in all these areas,
Canada is marching steadily backward. In A
Healthy Society, Ryan Meili, a practicing doctor who knows this first hand,
sounds a clarion call to all Canadians. We will not have a healthy society
until we put social justice and universal social security for all back at the
top of our political agenda.”
- Maude Barlow, National Chairperson, Council of
Canadians
About Dr. Ryan
Meili
Ryan Meili is a family doctor at the West Side Community
Clinic in Saskatoon. He also works for the College of Medicine at the
University of Saskatchewan as head of the Division of Social Accountability,
where he’s responsible for helping ensure that Saskatchewan’s future doctors
are equipped to meet the health needs of the diverse communities they will
serve. Ryan also serves as vice-chair of the national advocacy organization,
Canadian Doctors for Medicare.
A Healthy Society:
How a Focus on Health can Revive Canadian Democracy, published by Purich Publishing
of Saskatoon, is Dr. Meili’s first book.
From its inception, Ryan has been involved in SWITCH, the
Student Wellness Initiative Toward Community Health, a student-run,
interdisciplinary, inner-city clinic whose mandate is to bring students from nursing,
medicine, social work, physiotherapy, pharmacy, nutrition, and numerous other
disciplines together to serve the residents of Saskatoon’s core communities.
Ryan also runs the College of Medicine’s Making the Links
program, which gives medical students the opportunity to work in Northern
Saskatchewan, at SWITCH, and in the rural communities of Mozambique in
southeast Africa. One of the program’s goals is for students to gain firsthand
knowledge of the social factors influencing health by living among and working
with diverse peoples.
Ryan lives in Saskatoon with his wife, Mahli, who is
training to be a pediatrician, and their son, Abraham.