Health & Society

Overview

The Health & Society BHS program at York University will challenge you to look critically at biomedical models and practices, to understand the complexity of health policy, to see ways in which globalizing economies shape both illness and health care. It will also help you to appreciate the role played by social forces and cultural change in shaping individual well-being. Our unique program draws upon concepts and tools from many social scientific disciplines to explore the ways in which social conditions influence health and how health concerns shape social relations and institutions.

Health & Society is a term used to represent a body of scholarship that has emerged over the past twenty years in response to the limitations of a strictly biomedical approach to health issues.

• By seeing health in its social context, you’ll look beyond the limits of medicine as we know it, to a much wider set of questions that engage social, cultural, political and moral aspects of the human experience.
• Our program moves beyond a strictly biomedical approach to health issues and investigates such areas as health and the family, disabilities and the role of the medical professional in society.

Possible Career Paths Include:

This program's broad interdisciplinary approach to health in its social context makes an excellent foundation for careers in the health-care sector, counselling, voluntary and private agencies, government, law, journalism, health advocacy, education or social work.

• Community health/ health advocate
• Healthcare worker
• Alternative healthcare worker
• Health administration, management, policy officer
• Law/ teaching