The Challenge
The general health of our population arises from healthy lifestyles and good access to healthcare services. Currently those services are creaking at the seams as health statistics show that despite the high levels of health care available, we have deepening trends of avoidable ill health due to our lifestyles and diet. People are also living longer, and our aging and growing population in turn puts greater pressure on those public services. In addition, there are the challenges presented to our healthcare system by climate change, succinctly summed up by Dan Bednarz and Kristin Bradford:
Through our unrestricted use of energy and resources in the health care industry, as well as our production of greenhouse gases, we are actually contributing to the ill-health of our planet and ensuring future suffering of the Earth’s inhabitants1.
Footnotes
- Medicine at the Crossroads of Energy and Global Warming”, Synthesis/Regeneration, Winter 2008, tinyurl.com/5mbjy7 [↩]
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