IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v37y1993i2p129-138.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

State authority, medical dominance, and trends in the regulation of the health professions: The Ontario case

Author

Listed:
  • Coburn, David

Abstract

The relationships amongst the health professions and between them and the state are rapidly changing. I argue that analysis of these relationships has to take into consideration: the fact that medicine played an intermediary role (through medical dominance in health care) between the state and the other health occupations; the permeability of the boundaries of the state and the professions; and the dual nature of professional organizations (as sites of intra-occupational conflict and as possible vehicles of extra-occupational control). In Ontario the medical profession partially 'mediated' the relationships between 'non-physician' health occupations and the state through medical control over other health care occupations. National/provincial health insurance brought the state into the health care system as an actor and forced a reconsideration of its relationships with medicine and with the other health care occupations. The state came to be directly involved in 'rationalizing' health care. This involvement meant curbing the power of medicine and modifying the relationships between medicine and the para-medical occupations. State influence is partly constructed through a particular kind of professional organization, namely, the professional College. These changing relationships are illustrated by historical and recent developments regarding medicine, nursing and chiropractic in Ontario.

Suggested Citation

  • Coburn, David, 1993. "State authority, medical dominance, and trends in the regulation of the health professions: The Ontario case," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 129-138, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:2:p:129-138
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(93)90449-E
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Martin, Graham P. & Currie, Graeme & Finn, Rachael, 2009. "Reconfiguring or reproducing intra-professional boundaries? Specialist expertise, generalist knowledge and the 'modernization' of the medical workforce," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(7), pages 1191-1198, April.
    2. Benoit, Cecilia & Zadoroznyj, Maria & Hallgrimsdottir, Helga & Treloar, Adrienne & Taylor, Kara, 2010. "Medical dominance and neoliberalisation in maternal care provision: The evidence from Canada and Australia," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 475-481, August.
    3. Toth, Federico, 2015. "Sovereigns under Siege. How the medical profession is changing in Italy," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 136, pages 128-134.
    4. Ivy Lynn Bourgeault & Michel Grignon, 2013. "A Comparison of the Regulation of Health Professional Boundaries across OECD Countries," European Journal of Comparative Economics, Cattaneo University (LIUC), vol. 10(2), pages 199-223, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:2:p:129-138. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.