About Pat Armstrong

Pat Armstrong is co-author or editor on more than a dozen books on health care, including They Deserve Better: The long-term care experience in Canada and Scandinavia, Women’s Health: Intersections of Policy, Research and Practice, Critical to Care; The Invisible Women in Health Services, About Canada: Health Care, A Place to Call Home, Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform in Canada; Caring For/Caring About: Women, Home Care and Unpaid Caregiving; Heal Thyself: Managing Health Care Reform; Wasting Away: The Undermining of Canadian Health Care; Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn From Canada. She has also published on a wide variety of issues related to women's work and to social policy.
She has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology at York University and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She was a founding partner in the National Network on Environments and Women's Health, and has served as the interim Director, and she is the Chair of Women and Health Care Reform - a working group on health reform that crosses the Centres of Excellence for Women's Health. She is also a site director for the Ontario Training Centre in Health Services and Policy Research. Her current SSHRC-funded research looks at the risks nurses face in health care. Her CIHR-funded project compares conditions in Canada’s long-term care facilities with those in Nordic countries, which is the first step in a longer research program. Like most of her past research, this project relies primarily on the perspectives of those who actually provide or manage care within the system.
She has been involved as well in large collaborative research projects. One looks at the hidden costs and contributions in homecare; another explores health information technology and a third integrated precarious employment in health care. The latter project is connected to the development of the gender and work database, a project of the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy.