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Barbados is at a very advanced stage of population aging. Health care services are designed to ensure universal access for all Barbadians but the contributing factors for older adults’ health care utilization are not well explored. This chapter examines gender differences in the correlates of seeking medical care among older adults in Barbados.

Logistic regression models were applied to data drawn from the 2000 Survey of Health, Well-Being and Aging of Older Adults in Latin America and the Caribbean (SABE), Bridgetown sample (n = 1,068).

Health needs, based on chronic conditions, were positively associated with seeking medical care for men and women. Different forms and directions of intergenerational support were associated with men and women seeking care. Among men, receiving financial support was positively associated with seeking care. Among women, providing financial support was associated with lower odds of seeking care while receiving instrumental support was associated with higher odds of seeking care.

Medical care is only one form of health care use and there is no specification of the nature of care or consultation. The sample is cross-sectional and limited to older adults in urban areas. The relative importance of enabling factors and health needs, especially, may differ across time and space within Barbados.

The study contributes to the literature on health care utilization among older adults within developing countries and highlights the pertinence of family relations influencing gender differences in health care utilization.

This article addresses the health problems of Puerto Rico by looking at them from the perspective of food and agriculture, underlining that there is a substantial policy divide between agricultural policy and health. This reframing insists that we attend to the relationships between agriculture and food policy in order to offer new ways to think about the prevalence of so-called “lifestyle diseases” in Puerto Rico.

This study draws on a forensic research strategy that follows the framing of food and agriculture policies through a three-step diagnosis process using a mixed method approach. This three-dimensional analysis focuses on (1) history, (2) statistics, and (3) policies and legislations.

The disconnection between health and agriculture policies materializes (1) throughout 19-20^th century agricultural developments, (2) across the current agriculture organization, and, (3) through legislations and policies. A dominant understanding of agriculture as a predominantly economic and trade-driven sector fuels this policy divide.

This article calls for a new policy imagination that will allow for a re-conceptualization of agriculture policies as health policies. In order to bring forward this policy imagination, this article suggests returning to ideas that precede the production and articulation of the policy divide through a re-appropriation of Latin American indigenous knowledge and ideas. As such, the Andean concept of Buen Vivir represents a particularly promising path explored in this article.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which started in Hubei province of the People's Republic of China and spread to all parts of the world, has also deeply affected the tourism industry. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has faced many epidemics in recent years. Tourism has also been affected by many epidemics since the 2000s. These epidemics are severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), bird flu, Ebola, swine flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Zika. According to these epidemics, the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected international tourism. Borders were closed, curfews were declared in many countries and quarantine practices were made for 14 days from those who came from outside the border. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic is quite different from other epidemics. In April 2020, international flights were stopped for the first time in tourism history all over the world. From this point of view, the aim of the study is to compare the effects of COVID-19 pandemic and epidemics that occurred after the 2000s on the tourism sector. The study focuses on COVID-19 pandemic, SARS, bird flu, Ebola, swine flu, MERS and Zika epidemics. The study also includes a review of studies on epidemics in previous years.

The incipient HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chile poses challenges for responsiveness of the Chilean national health care system, Fondo Nacional de Salud (FONASA) (National Health Funds), especially given the sociocultural forces for inertia in FONASA. Thus, the issue is what is the nature of the forces for change. A grounded theory approach was applied to interview data from two qualitative studies, one with HIV/AIDS advocates and activists as interviewees and the other with Chilean low-income women. The stories of their experiences with and perceptions of FONASA revealed major issues facing FONASA, including quality of care and ethics. Ways in which these issues are being addressed by the activists result in constructed environmental dynamism. A conceptual model of the forces for change was developed including actors, strategies, and targets of change that constitutes organizational environmental dynamism. The construct of environmental dynamism has international applicability, particularly to governmental health systems, which are influenced by strong sociocultural forces.

The foremost objective of this chapter was to present an overview of the cooperative healthcare sector in Argentina by reviewing its brief history, components and the role these healthcare cooperatives play in the society. The second objective was to look at how these cooperatives have helped women and the local communities in which they operate.

This paper has used chiefly secondary data derived from various academic papers and official and government websites which publish cooperative sector-related information. The intention was to construct a concise yet detailed study that would be of help to other researchers in the field of healthcare cooperatives since the data related to Argentina is highly scattered and frequently found not up to date.

The research has found that health cooperatives in Argentina have aided in overcoming problems in the sector such as sectoral fragmentation, negligence and frequently inadequate standards of care management as well as operational and implementation failures that the private and government healthcare players have been accused of being fraught with. Furthermore, the cooperatives have frequently played a complementary or supplementary role rather than a competitive one with the private and government players.

Through the examples presented in this chapter, it is evident that health cooperatives in Argentina are making large impacts in the healthcare domain along with positively impacting women, marginalised and vulnerable sections of the society and the community. It only remains to be seen now how far this sector will grow in the future and how many more lives will be benefitted.

As a Small Island Developing State, Jamaica merits special consideration in discussions on climate change. This reality has arguably been heightened by COVID-19, forcing even more attention to identifying recovery measures which do not exacerbate existing vulnerabilities. Using future scenarios methodology, the chapter identifies four possible scenarios for Jamaica, highlighting the limitations and opportunities for socioeconomic recovery post-COVID-19. In so doing, it also identifies the means, actors and actions for achieving the most desirable scenario from the perspective of resilience and adaptation to climate change (SDG 13) and the preservation of biodiversity (SDGs 14 and 15). It concludes that Jamaica is currently on a trajectory which does not sufficiently consider the risks of climate change and biodiversity loss. Notwithstanding, there is optimism that the government will implement policies to arrest the current trajectory, including integrating economic development planning with the imperatives for climate change adaptation and protecting biodiversity and giving more voice to non-governmental stakeholders.